Sage Of Srilanka - Geoffrey Bawa wins Aga Khan Chairman's Award

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2001 by David Robson

Sage of Sri Lanka: Geoffrey bawa has always been in the forefront of regional architecture in South Asia. Now, at the end of an inventive and insightful career, his achievements in rediscovering traditional Sri Lankan architecture and relating it to modernity have been recognized by the Aga Khan with the Chairman's Award, only the third time it has ever been given.

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.

On only the third occasion since he founded the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1977, the Aga Khan will present the special Chairman's Award during the 2001 Award cycle to Bawa to honour and celebrate his lifetime achievements.

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 the Second World War 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 28 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.

Return

But the plan to buy an Italian villa came to nothing 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 38 and returned to Ceylon to take over what was left of Reid's practice.

He gathered 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 left the practice in 1967 to return to Europe and Bawa was joincd by the engineer K. Poologasundram, who remained his partner for the next 20 years. The practice established itself as the most respected and prolific in Sri Lanka, with a portfolio that included religious, social, cultural, educ ational, governmental, commercial and residential buildings, creating a canon of prototypes in each of these areas.

Springboard

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, 8km east of Colombo (AR May 1983). 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.