Geoffrey Bawa The Famous Gay Sri Lankan Architec

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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. Highly personal in his approach, evoking the pleasures of the senses that go hand in hand with the climate, landscape, and culture of ancient Ceylon, Bawa brings together an appreciation of the Western humanist tradition in architecture with needs and lifestyles of his own country. Although Bawa came to practice at the age of 38, his buildings over the last 25 or more years are widely acclaimed in Sri Lanka. The intense devotion he brings to composing his architecture in an intimate relationship with nature is witnessed by his attention to landscape and vegetation, the crucial setting for his architecture. His sensitivity to environment is reflected in his careful attention to the sequencing of space, the creation of vistas, courtyards, and walkways, the use of materials and treatment of details.

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.
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.

His projects in Sri Lanka

New Parliament complex Kotte
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Official Residence of the President Kotte
Hilton Hotel Colombo
Ruhunu University Matara
Gangaraama Seema Malakaya Colombo
Bentota Beach Hotel Bentota
Bishop's College Colombo
Blue Water Hotel Colombo
Chapel for the Good Sheperd Convent Bandarawela
Club House Ratnapura
Club Mediterranee Nilaveli
Club Villa Hotel Bentota
Coral Gardens Hotel additions and renovations Hikkaduwa
De Soysa House Colombo
Deraniyagala House Colombo
Ekala Industrial Estate Jaela
Fitzherbert House Tangalle

Kandalama Hotel Dambulla
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Kani Lanka Resort & Spa Kalutara
Lighthouse Hotel Galle
Lunuganga Bentota
Neptune Hotel Beruwala
Panama Hotel Panama
Serendib Hotel Bentota
Spencer House Colombo
State Mortgage Bank Colombo
Triton Hotel Ahungalla
Yala Beach Hotel Yala

nice post

lankaave minissu thamanta vasiyak thiyanawanam eka gayda? bi da? mokekda? huuniyamkaarayekda kiyala wath ganan ganne naha, ugen thamange wede gannawa. vaasiyak nah vage nam e minihawa paaganawa. Jeoffrey Bawa wage ayata kisima balapaamak aawe naththe ekai.

Siyapath wrote:lankaave minissu thamanta vasiyak thiyanawanam eka gayda? bi da? mokekda? huuniyamkaarayekda kiyala wath ganan ganne naha, ugen thamange wede gannawa. vaasiyak nah vage nam e minihawa paaganawa. Jeoffrey Bawa wage ayata kisima balapaamak aawe naththe ekai.

සිරාම කතාවක්.