Geoffrey
Bawa is Sri Lanka's most prolific and influential
architect. His work has had tremendous impact upon
architecture throughout Asia and is unanimously
acclaimed by connoisseurs of architecture worldwide.
Surprisingly, however, his architecture is not well
known outside the region, and has not received the
international attention it deserves. On only the
third occasion since he founded the Aga Khan Award
for Architecture in 1977, His Highness the Aga Khan
will present the special Chairman's Award during
the 2001 Award cycle to Mr. Bawa to honour and celebrate
his lifetime achievements in and contribution to
the field of architecture.
Bawa
was born in 1919 in what was then the British colony
of Ceylon. His father was a wealthy and successful
lawyer, of Muslim and English parentage, while his
mother was of mixed German, Scottish and Sinhalese
descent. In 1938 he went to Cambridge to read English,
before studying law in London, where he was called
to the Bar in 1944. After World War II he joined
a Colombo law firm, but he soon tired of the legal
profession and in 1946 set off on two years of travel
that took him through the Far East, across the United
States and finally to Europe.
In
Italy he toyed with the idea of settling down permanently
and resolved to buy a villa overlooking Lake Garda.
He was now twenty-eight and had spent one-third
of his life away from Ceylon. Not only had he become
more and more European in outlook, but his ties
to Ceylon were also weakening: both his parents
were dead and he had disposed of the last of his
Colombo property. The plan to buy an Italian villa
came to nothing, however, and in 1948 he returned
to Ceylon where he bought an abandoned rubber estate
at Lunuganga, on the south-west coast between Colombo
and Galle. His dream was to create an Italian garden
from a tropical wilderness, but he soon found that
his ideas were compromised by lack of technical
knowledge. In 1951 he was apprenticed to H H Reid,
the sole surviving partner of the Colombo architectural
practice Edwards, Reid and Begg. When Reid died
suddenly a year later Bawa returned to England and,
after spending a year at Cambridge, enrolled as
a student at the Architectural Association in London,
where he is remembered as the tallest, oldest and
most outspoken student of his generation.
Bawa
finally qualified as an architect in 1957 at the
age of thirty-eight and returned to Ceylon to take
over what was left of Reid's practice. 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. As well
as his immediate office colleagues this group included
the batik artist Ena de Silva, the designer Barbara
Sansoni and the artist Laki Senanayake, all of whose
work figures prominently in his buildings.
He
was joined in 1959 by Ulrik Plesner, a young Danish
architect who brought with him an appreciation of
Scandinavian design and detailing, a sense of professionalism
and a curiosity about Sri Lanka's building traditions.
The two formed a close friendship and a symbiotic
working relationship that lasted until Plesner quit
the practice in 1967 to return to Europe and Bawa
was joined by the engineer K Poologasundram, who
remained his partner for the next twenty years.
The practice established itself as the most respected
and prolific 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. It also became the 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 that has rarely been matched. During
the early 1970s a series of buildings for government
departments developed 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 bio-climatic high-rises.
Bawa's
growing prestige was recognized in 1979, when he
was invited by President Jayawardene to design Sri
Lanka's new Parliament at Kotte, 8 kilometres east
of Colombo. At Bawa's suggestion the swampy site
was dredged to create an island at the centre 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. Abstract references to traditional
Sri Lankan and South Indian architecture were incorporated
within a Modernist framework to create 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 theatre across
a pair of rocky hills overlooking the southern ocean.
These
projects brought Bawa international recognition
and his work was celebrated in a Mimar monograph
by Brian Brace Taylor and in a London exhibition.
A later book by Christoph Bon on Lunuganga served
both as a personal tribute to a friend and a beautiful
photographic evocation of a garden. But the Parliament
building and Ruhunu had left Bawa exhausted and
at the end of the 1980s he withdrew from his partnership
with Poologasundram and relinquished the name Edwards,
Reid and Begg. He was now seventy and it was widely
assumed that he would retire to Lunuganga and contemplate
his garden. However, the break signalled a fresh
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 Centre for Singapore. None of these was built
but each was treated 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,
demonstrates 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 forty
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 was tragically struck down by a massive
stroke that left him paralysed and unable to speak.
A small group of colleagues, led by Channa Daswatte,
have continued to work on the projects he initiated
before his illness - an official residence for the
President, a house in Bombay, a hotel in Panadura
- with drawings being taken down the corridor from
the office to Bawa's bedroom for nods of approval
or rejection.
Looking
back over his career, two projects hold the key
to an understanding of Bawa's work: the garden at
Lunuganga that he has continued to fashion for almost
fifty years, and his own house in Colombo's Bagatelle
Road. Lunuganga is a distant retreat, an outpost
on the edge of the known world, a civilized garden
within the larger 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 knocking together four tiny bungalows
and adding a white entry tower that peers like a
periscope across neighbouring 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
its long and colourful history Sri Lanka has been
subjected to strong outside influences from its
Indian neighbours, from Arab traders and from European
colonists, and it has always succeeded in translating
these elements into something new but intrinsically
Sri Lankan. Bawa has continued this tradition. 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; he 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.
Since
Bawa started out on his career, Sri Lanka's population
has almost tripled, while its communities have been
fractured by bitter political and ethnic disputes.
Although it might be thought that his buildings
have had no direct impact on the lives of ordinary
people, Bawa has exerted a defining influence on
the emerging architecture of independent Sri Lanka
and on successive generations of younger architects.
His ideas have spread across the island, providing
a bridge between the past and the future, a mirror
in which ordinary people can obtain a clearer image
of their own evolving culture.
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