Looking at Geoffrey Bawa...

(Memorial Lecture at the inaugural Geoffrey Bawa commemoration

ceremony held on his 84th birth anniversary 23 July 2003)

Senake Bandaranayake

The deaths in May 2003, within a few days of each other, of Geoffrey
Bawa and the bibliographer and documentalist Ian Goonetileke were
both important markers in the passing of cultural time, in the
formation of Sri Lanka’s contemporary intellectual landscape. Their
lives span the 20th century. Born on either side of 1920 (Bawa in
mid-1919; Goonetileke in January 1922), beginning their
apprenticeship in the 1940s, and producing their first mature work in
the 1960s, they belonged to that remarkable generation of immediate
post-war and post-Independence artists, writers, scientists, analysts
and intellectuals – working in English, Sinhala, Tamil and the
languages of art, science and technology – whose creativity was
marked by the optimism of reconstruction and national resurgence,
and the excitement of discovery and rediscovery.

Inheriting the austerities and constraints of a post-war world, and

the shambles of an incomplete modern transition extending over four
hundred years of colonial hegemony, they set out to create something
new; and also to draw on, to synthesise, the lessons of history; to discover
– consciously or unconsciously -- the constructs appropriate to their time
and place, with a complexity and comprehensiveness of vision, and a
perfection of craft. Pursuing the highest standards of excellence and
sensitive to international calibration, they used the materials and
resources that were at hand. Thus, the high quality of their achievement is
also marked by its distinctiveness, its Sri Lankan focus, form and content.

Despite Brian Brace Taylor’s and David Robson’s books on

1
Bawa, and studies like the less easily accessible Anjalendran-
Wanasundera overview of twentieth century building2, the history of
contemporary Sri Lankan architecture has still to be properly documented
and studied. Venturing into a field that is somewhat outside the scope of
my own work, I would like to highlight a few aspects of Bawa’s
contribution to the culture of his time.

Geoffrey Bawa’s main achievement lies in the creation of a new

but specifically Sri Lankan architectural vocabulary, which he deployed
in a large body of work. It stands as an icon of our time, echoed in its
extensions and variations in the work of an entire generation of younger
architects belonging to what we might call ‘the Bawa School’. This
 2

tradition was at least partly inspired by the spirit and language of the
International Style, pioneered by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and
the Dutch and German schools, de Stijl and the Bauhaus, in the 1920s and
‘30s, but Bawa was in no way replicatory or imitative. Whatever
subterranean effect international developments and international
experience may have had on his work, it was wholly absorbed and
interpreted in Sri Lankan contexts, usages and forms, using conventional
materials and technology. In other words, he did for contemporary
architecture what the ’43 Group did for painting, Martin Wickremasinghe
for the Sinhala novel, Ediriweera Sarathchandra for theatre, Lester James
Peries for film.3

The International Style in architecture was marked by several

distinguishing features, amongst the most important of which were a
complete break with ‘historical form’ and the creation of a new aesthetic
based on an intimate relationship between material – especially new
industrial materials – form, and function. As part of the modern
movement, its architectonics, ornamentation, internal and external
finishes, even its furniture and fittings, absorbed and contributed to
contemporary avant-garde art and design. Above all, it deployed space in
an entirely new way.

The lessons that Bawa drew from this led him to break with
mainstream European-influenced design, such as Neo-Classicism and its
opposite, Orientalism, both of which dominated Sri Lankan public and
elite architecture for a century before the 1960s. He evolved a new
language of form and space based on his contemporary reading of the
indigenous Sri Lankan architectural tradition, which was also still alive
around him.

We see therefore that although Bawa’s work is imbued with the

spirit of the International Style, his architecture is in some ways the
opposite of internationalist modernism. More important to him, even his
principal source, was the ‘perennial’ Sri Lankan architectural landscape.
It was the lessons and experience of this that he transformed and applied
to new contexts and new uses.

Taylor and more extensively, Robson, have described Bawa’s work

in detail, but we may point to some specific features. Bawa emphasised
the utilisation of well-known existing materials and architectural
elements. He popularised the return of the traditional, half-round,
terracotta roof tile in elite and middle-class housing, as well as the
unglazed or red-slipped terracotta floor tile, whose use had almost
 3

disappeared by the mid-twentieth century. The open, pillared walkway or

corridor and the deep extended veranda were hallmarks of even his most
ambitious projects. He reiterated the importance of the traditional pitched
roof and the open courtyard, and brought these features back into
domestic housing – especially the courtyard, which had been more or less
abandoned by the late nineteenth century. In his earlier, small-scale
buildings, he attached special importance to the use of värati, a shell
fossil based lime wash, which imparted a soft but glaring white finish to
walls.

He incorporated a great deal from the architecture of ‘manorial’

buildings, the valavvas of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
which were themselves derived from the architecture of the village. We
also see echoes in his work of the less well-known and now almost
entirely extinct street architecture of traditional urban centres. Bawa often
quoted the manorial architecture in his contemporary design, and used
some of its characteristic motifs: the colonnaded veranda, turned wooden
columns, large glazed jars, moulding-decorated door-frames, panelled
and painted door and window shutters, the seventeenth-eighteenth
century fanlight, and occasionally the mal-läli or elaborately carved
ventilators that were placed above doors and windows, and the wide
shallow drain, the sapattu kanuva. He also had a significant influence on
the increasing interest in the use of antique furniture, common in period
houses, showing how appropriately it could be incorporated in a
contemporary aesthetic.

The traditional domestic dwelling was a combination of enclosed,

dark, but often thoughtfully-ventilated internal spaces, and open airy
verandas and internal courtyards. The house, unless it was a street house,
usually stood in its own garden – an unshaded inner garden, with many
potted plants and flowering shrubs, and a tree-covered outer garden.
Bawa re-interpreted this and created his own distinctive use of space,
opening the house out into the garden and bringing the garden into the
house, but also leaving well covered and private internal areas. He paid
special attention to selecting plant material, especially the bold use of
foliage plants. His thirty-year ‘encounter’ with Lunuganga, the elaborate
riverside garden complex he fashioned around his country house at
Bentota, epitomises these interests.

A special aspect of the Sri Lankan architectural tradition that has

not been much examined is its inspired use of location and terrain.4 This
is amply demonstrated in the giri monasteries of the classic period, such
as Mihintale, Sigiriya, Situlpahuva, Varana and Vessagiriya, and
 4

numerous other locations, with their boulder garden layouts and

distinctive rock-associated architecture. It is also seen in a more subtle
form in the carefully selected undulating topography of the site locations
of the nineteenth century temples in the Southern and Western Provinces.
Some of Bawa’s most significant projects, such as the Vällemadama
campus of the Ruhuna University and the Integral Education Centre at
Piliyandala, display the same inspired use of topography and landscape.
His most dramatic experiments in this regard are the house at Polontalava
and the Kandalama Hotel.

Bawa’s extensive use of water, of reflecting pools and other water

retaining structures, often used to link the building with its gardens and
its wider setting,5 is also an echo of the classic tradition of Anuradhapura,
Sigiriya and Polonnaruva, reiterated in the palace and lake at Kandy. The
connection is perhaps entirely accidental – except in a few instances, such
as in the Parliament Complex at Kotte, where Bawa himself says that he
was consciously influenced by Anuradhapura models. Moreover, like the
master-builders of the past – and perhaps many contemporary master
architects – Bawa designed his buildings from rough sketches and the use
of hand and eye on site, which ideas were then translated by his office
into architectural drawings, often constantly modified as construction was
underway.

The spatial relationships in Bawa’s buildings, worked out with an

intricate but ‘perfect’ geometry, were his very special signature. At the
heart of his creativity was an unerring aesthetic sensibility, the precise
building blocks of which have not yet been fully investigated in the sense
that they may prove to be capable of mathematical and modular analysis.
Perhaps it is the totality and complexity of this aesthetic sensibility,
which educated several generations of Sri Lankan design and designers,
that is his most enduring contribution.

It should be part of our tribute to Geoffrey Bawa to conclude by

addressing briefly some of the issues that have been raised regarding his
work. How are his buildings ‘read’ by Sri Lankan society at large? This
involves a huge discussion and, as yet, in the absence of structured
opinion studies, most of it will be pure speculation. The development of
aesthetic sensibility in any society is always a complex and many-layered
process, and especially so in a transitional, developing society like ours.
But if I take the university community at large, as a test case, I wonder
whether there is any preference for the elaborate but cramped Victorian-
orientalism of College House in Colombo, the ‘orientalist décor’ of
Shirley de Alwis’ heavy masonry Arts Block at the University of
 5

Peradeniya, the post-war PWD-style of Kelaniya or Bawa’s breathtaking

campus at Vällemadama. I can only leave this as an open question. Much
depends on whether a person’s response to architecture is conscious or
unconscious, ‘conventional’, ‘new’, ‘educated’, instinctive’. It is
probably true of most people in a society like ours that they are so
engaged with the day-to-day world of work and the exigencies of
personal life, that they scarcely have room or time for a conscious
reaction to the architecture around them, responding to it if at all only
subliminally.

Certainly, the subliminal experience of architectural environment

and cultural landscape is always important, as I have learnt by speaking
with visitors to Sigiriya over the years. Although many of them make a
beeline for the ‘highlights’ – the rock, the paintings and the palace –
when asked about the work done on the preservation and clarification of
the Water Gardens, the Boulder Gardens and the moat and forest
environments, they are so responsive and excited by it – as Geoffrey
Bawa himself was – showing that these other dimensions of the Sigiriya
complex have also been seen and absorbed.

The question of ‘popular taste’, of the many-layered aesthetic that

a society, a culture, manifests at each stage in its historical evolution and
at different socio-cultural levels, is a little studied, largely ignored and
immensely difficult subject. Geoffrey Bawa’s contribution to the
formation of an architectural language in Sri Lanka in the latter half of
the 20th century, the vocabulary and grammar that he forged in his re-
interpretation and ‘modernisation’ of tradition, is not only an
achievement but a challenge.

The generalisation of the many lessons that Bawa’s architecture

offered to late 20th and early 21st century building in Sri Lanka – and
even further afield elsewhere in tropical Asia – is the best index to his
achievement. Stringent analysts may critique certain aspects of Bawa’s
architecture: its restriction to elite private homes, hotels and public
buildings; its failure to address the huge demand for urban and suburban
mass housing;6 its use of a ‘pre-industrial’ architectural vocabulary; its
exploitatory use of landscape; its endorsement of the cannibalisation of
period buildings for their wooden elements; the high cost of maintenance;
the repetition of formula, especially in some of the later projects; his
‘aestheticisation’ of internal and sometimes of external space. But to
emphasise all this is also to the miss the main point: his work, like that of
a innovative artist, a philosopher or a theoretical physicist, is a
fundamental contribution to the formation of contemporary culture. It
 6

places the responsibility on succeeding generations to recognise and learn

from its historic role and to turn, as he did in his time, the next chapter.
1
Notes and references

Brian Bruce Taylor, Geoffrey Bawa, London, 1986; David Robson and Geoffrey Bawa, Geoffrey
Bawa: The Compete Works, London, 2002.
2

C. Anjalendran and Rajiv Wanasundara, ‘Trends and transitions - a review of styles and influences on
the built form in Sri Lanka, 1940-1990’, A+D; Architecture and Design, 7 (2) March-April 1990: 26-
33.
3
We may record here that another pioneer in this enterprise was Minette de Silva, whose work has
been described as ‘more complex but less developed than Geoffrey Bawa’s.’ That the full potential of
Minette de Silva’s architecture remained unrealised throws into focus the high organisational and
managerial skills (and ambitious vision) that Bawa silently brought into play throughout his career,
especially with the assistance of his very systematic professional partner, Dr. Poologasundaram. Of
course, Bawa himself, in his life and work, stood for the pre-eminence of creativity and spontaneity
over ‘organisation’, regulation and routine. For an account of de Silva’s work see: The Life and Work
of an Asian Woman Architect: Minette de Silva (eds) Minette de Silva, Ashley de Vos and Susil
Sirivardana, Kandy, 1998.
4
See Bandaranayake, S., Sinhalese Monastic Architecture, Leiden, 1974: 55; also Bandaranayake, S.,
‘Sigiriya and the Sri Lankan art of landscape gardening,' Seminar on Sigiriya (bound volume; mimeo),
Colombo, 1983:7-9.
5

I am indebted to Ismeth Raheem for underlining for me the importance of water in many of Bawa’s
buildings. Ismeth Raheem who, like a number of inspired Sri Lankan architects of the successor
generation worked for many years in Bawa’s office, also drew my attention to Bawa’s working method
of designing on site rather than in the architectural office. In a wider context, I must also acknowledge
many instructive conversations and journeys over the years in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, with C.
Anjalendran, who also worked closely with Bawa and is one of the most creative architects of the post-
Bawa generation.
6
David Robson has responded to some of these issues in the following way, in a comment sent to a
Cambridge journal, ARQ: ‘…out of the total of two hundred designs [by Bawa]…seventy were
individual private houses, and thirty five were for hotels…another ninety five belonged to other
typologies… Between 1970 and 1977, for example, during a period of socialist government, his
portfolio was almost devoid of private houses or hotels, and he functioned very successfully as an
architect of the State…[later] over a period of twenty years…he produced exemplary low cost designs
for two ‘Boys’ Towns’, a Montessori school, a farm orphanage, a silk farm, a convent, a chapel and a
centre for continuing education. In the field of education he built extensions to four Colombo schools
and master-planned two university campuses. His oeuvre also included industrial estates, factory
buildings, office buildings and a number of public buildings…In the field of housing Bawa did design a
number of interesting grouped projects, all of them to some degree experimental and all of them worthy
of study…’ (pers. comm., David Robson 2003).