An Architect of Sri Lanka- Geoffrey Bawa

Geoffrey Bawa was born in Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka), the younger son of a wealthy Muslim lawyer and his Dutch Burger wife. After graduating, he studied English at Cambridge and Law in London. He had always preferred to be treated as a Ceylon-born European instead of a Ceylonese who had some European blood in his veins. Perhaps he came to the conclusion that he was more Asian than European, Bawa decided to return to Colombo in 1948. “Soon after he returned, he bought an abandoned rubber estate and transformed it into landscaped garden” . He soon found that he needed technical knowledge to transform his designs into real buildings. Thus, he “enrolled to study at the Architecture Association in London, where he finally qualified as an architect in 1957 at the age of thirty-eight” .

Bawa’s ideas and styles

“His background enabled him to fit into almost any condition just like a chameleon” . He liked traveling. Beautiful images of the visited places nourished him. For example, gardens in Italy and courtyards in Alhambra. Elements of local architecture that inspired him were winding staircase of Sinhalese architecture, Portuguese’s half-round clay tile, and overhangs supported by columns of Dutch houses. These images assisted him in subconsciously integrating all these past architecture, into his designs to solve present needs. And for him, “a good Sri Lanka architecture was not narrowly classified as Indian, Portuguese or Dutch, early Sinhalese or Kandyan or British Colonial, for all the good examples of these periods had been integrated and introduced to the context of Sri Lanka ”.

Bawa was always a Modernist. His idea about designing was, “a design must originate from a clear statement of functional requirements. But, if the core idea for a building evolved from its functional purposes, its conception took place only when the core idea was introduced into a context” . For Bawa, the context referred to the local people, tradition, history, site and... [continues]

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