Geoffrey Bawa is Sri Lanka's most prolific architect and a master at merging disparate cultures through design. The London-educated architect has blended traditional Sri Lankan and South Indian architecture with modern. His work has had tremendous influence on architecture throughout Asia.
Surprisingly, despite critical acclaim worldwide, Bawa's work has not received the degree of attention it deserves. But this changed recently when he became one of only three people ever to receive the special Chairman's Award of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture .

East And West

Born in 1919 in what was then the British colony of Ceylon, Bawa came to architecture by a circuitous path, qualifying as an architect in 1957 at the age of 38. Returning to Ceylon from his London education, he gathered together a group of talented young designers and artists who shared his growing interest in Ceylon's forgotten architectural heritage and his ambition to develop new ways of making and building.

Working within the respectable but dying practice of Edwards, Reid and Begg, they soon made it into the most prolific firm in Sri Lanka, with a portfolio that included religious, social, cultural, educational, governmental, commercial, and residential buildings, creating a canon of prototypes in each of these areas, and becoming a springboard for a new generation of young Sri Lankan architects.
One of Bawa's earliest domestic buildings, a courtyard house built in Colombo for Ena De Silva in 1961, was the first to fuse elements of traditional Sinhalese domestic architecture with modern concepts of open planning, demonstrating that an outdoor life is viable on a tight urban plot.

The Bentota Beach Hotel of 1968 was Sri Lanka's first purpose-built resort hotel, combining the conveniences required by demanding tourists with a sense of place and continuity.

During the early 1970s a series of buildings for government departments developed new ideas for the workplace in a tropical city, culminating in the State Mortgage Bank in Colombo, hailed at the time as one of the world's first bioclimatic high-rises.

The Master Receives Recognition

In 1979 Bawa was invited to design Sri Lanka's new parliament. He transformed a swampy site to create an island at the center of a vast artificial lake, with the parliament building appearing as an asymmetric composition of copper roofs floating above a series of terraces rising out of the water.

The parliament building incorporates abstract references to traditional Sri Lankan and South Indian architecture within a Modernist framework to create, in the words of the Aga Khan awards jury, "a powerful image of democracy, cultural harmony, continuity and progress, and a sense of gentle monumentality."

During the 1980s Bawa also designed the new Ruhunu University near Matara, a project that enabled him to demonstrate his mastery of external space and the integration of buildings in a landscape. The result is a matrix of pavilions and courtyards, arranged with careful casualness and a strong sense of theater across a pair of rocky hills overlooking the southern ocean.

At the age of 70, Bawa withdrew from his partnership, and it was widely assumed that he would retire to Lunuganga and contemplate the garden he had fashioned for nearly 50 years.

A Fresh Restart

Instead, the break signaled a new round of creative activity, and he began to work from his home in Bagatelle Road, Colombo, with a small group of young architects. Together they embarked on a stream of ambitious designs — hotels on Bali and Bintan, houses in Delhi and Ahmedabad, and a Cloud Center for Singapore. None of these projects was built, but each served as a test bed for new ideas.

Some of these ideas came to fruition in three hotels built in Sri Lanka in the 1990s: the Kandalama, conceived as an austere jungle palace, snaking around a rocky outcrop on the edge of an ancient tank in the Dry Zone; the Lighthouse at Galle, defying the southern oceans from its boulder-strewn headland; and the Blue Water, a cool pleasure pavilion set within a sedate coconut grove on the edge of Colombo.

All three demonstrate Bawa's concern to "consult the genius of the place in all," as well as his skill at integrating architecture and landscape, and his scenographic manipulation of space.

One final house, designed for the Jayawardene family in 1997 as a weekend retreat on the cliffs of Mirissa, shows Bawa's unflagging inventiveness. A phalanx of slender columns supports a wafer-thin roof to create a minimalist pavilion facing the southern ocean and the setting sun. Nearly 40 years separate the Jayawardene House from the Ena de Silva House, but they are two points on a continuum, one a distillation of the other.

In 1998 Bawa suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to speak. A small group of colleagues has continued to work on the projects he initiated before his illness — an official residence for the Sri Lankan president, a house in Bombay, a hotel in Panadura. They take drawings down the corridor from their office to Bawa's bedroom for nods of approval or rejection.

In Retrospect

Looking back over Bawa's career, two projects may hold the key to understanding his work: the garden at Lunuganga and his own house in Colombo's Bagatelle Road.

Lunuganga is a civilized garden retreat in the wilderness of Sri Lanka, transforming an ancient rubber estate into a series of outdoor rooms that evoke memories of Sacro Bosco and Stourhead.

The town house, in contrast, is an introspective assemblage of courtyards, verandas, and loggias, created by bringing together four tiny bungalows and adding a white entry tower that peers across neighboring rooftops towards the distant ocean. It is a haven of peace, an infinite garden of the mind, locked away within a busy and increasingly hostile city.

Throughout Sri Lanka's long and colorful history, the country has weathered strong outside influences from its Indian neighbors, from Arab traders, and from European colonists, and has translated these influences into something new, yet intrinsically Sri Lankan.

This is the tradition Bawa has continued. His architecture is a subtle blend of modernity and tradition, East and West, formal and picturesque. He has broken down the artificial segregation of inside and outside, building and landscape.

Geoffrey Bawa has drawn on tradition to create an architecture that is fitting to its place, and he has also used his vast knowledge of the modern world to create an architecture that is of its time.

A monograph on the 2001 Aga Khan Award, Modernity and Community: Architecture in the Islamic World , from Thames & Hudson, will include full descriptions and illustrations of the nine winning projects.

by ArchitectureWeek ArchitectureWeek No. 84, 2002.0130, pN1.1