Geoffrey Bawa

Geoffrey Manning Bawa was born in Sri Lanka on 23 July 1919 and died on 27 May 2003, aged eighty-three. The Geoffrey Bawa Trust, which looks after his estate, records that he studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London between 1954 and 1957. He came to the profession by an indirect route. A Yale School of Architecture exhibition text notes that he was practising as a lawyer when he bought the land that became his first project.

The Trust describes his mixed ancestry and wide travels as the source of his view of the past as layered. It counts 200 original designs over his career and stresses his regard for Sri Lanka's landscape.

His first work was a garden. In 1948, close to his thirtieth birthday and to the country's independence, Bawa acquired a former rubber and cinnamon plantation at Bentota. It is called Lunuganga, which the Trust translates as Salt River. He went on reshaping it for decades: the Trust's list of works dates the garden from 1948 to 1997. Bawa described the land as "about twenty-five acres".

His town house grew in a similar way. In 1959 he rented one of a row of four houses on 33rd Lane in Colombo from Harold Peiris, a lawyer and writer. Within ten years he had bought all four and renovated them into the single property known as Number 11. Both places are now open to visitors on guided tours.

From 1958 to 1989 Bawa worked through the office of Edwards, Reid and Begg, and from 1990 to 1997 as Geoffrey Bawa Associates. The Trust's list of selected works shows the range. Early commissions included school classrooms, an estate bungalow at Maskeliya and private houses. In 1962 Ena de Silva and her husband Osmund asked him to design a house in Colombo. The Trust calls the design radically modern while drawing on traditional features such as the central courtyard, and regards it as a pivotal project in his career.

Hotels followed, among them the Bentota Beach Hotel (1967 to 1973), the Kandalama Hotel near Dambulla (1991 to 1994) and the Lighthouse Hotel near Galle (1995 to 1997). His public work included the Ruhunu University campus near Matara and the Seema Malaka temple on Beira Lake in Colombo.

Bawa's public commissions included the new Parliament of Sri Lanka. The Parliament records that construction at Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte began in 1979 and was completed in 1982, with Geoffrey Bawa of Edwards, Reid and Begg as architect and a Japanese consortium of two Mitsui companies as builder.

His work is often placed under the label tropical modernism. A review published by the Yale School of Architecture treats that term with caution, as shorthand that can hide the detail of each project. It points instead to how Bawa and his colleagues studied the way modern materials behaved in Sri Lanka's climate, and how he used features already on a site, such as large boulders, as part of a building. Bawa himself said, as the review reports, that he could not work without first seeing the site.

Bawa set up two non-profit trusts in his lifetime and left his whole estate to them. The Lunuganga Trust dates from 1993. Together the trusts manage four properties: Number 11 in Colombo, the garden estate at Lunuganga, the Ena de Silva House and the de Saram House in Colombo.

The Ena de Silva House shows how far that care extends. When its owner wished to sell the land in Colombo in 2009, the Lunuganga Trust had the house taken apart and rebuilt at Lunuganga, where it now stands. The trusts also hold an archive, with more than 5,000 drawings, photographs, documents and films catalogued so far. They organise awards for Sri Lankan architecture every three years and an annual memorial lecture. In 2019 and 2020 they marked the centenary of his birth with a programme of events.