THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE

ARCHITECT: GEOFFREY BAWA

COMPILED BY:

SHREYA PAL

ROLL NO.12

B ARCH.IV (S.S)

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. 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. Throughout Sri Lanka's long and colourful history, the country

has weathered strong outside influences from its Indian neighbours, from Arab traders, and from European colonists, and has translated these influencesinto 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.

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 Stour head.

LUNUGANGA

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 towardsthe distant ocean. It is a haven of peace, an infinite garden of the mind, locked away within a busy and increasingly hostile city

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

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 Indianarchitecture were incorporated within a Modernist framework to create a powerful image of democracy, cultural harmony, continuity and progress and a sense of gentle monumentality.