Bawa's shapes and spaces

In those years he gave up law, having practised as a barrister for about six months, to travel the world. A slow grand tour, first on a steamer across the Pacific from Colombo to San Francisco via Penang and the Philippines, then on to Europe for a long stay, before turning to Sri Lanka. There he spent many months looking for the ideal piece of earth on which to create his own paradise and finally in 1950, settled for Lunuganga in Bentota as that place. 

On it, he created a place that embodied some of the good life he had seen and experienced. It was while he was still involved in the formative phases of making his garden, his initial experimentations with architecture, that a visiting cousin urged him to consider architecture as a profession. This and an early talent discovered at Cambridge, where his friends recognised and valued his judgement in things aesthetic, gave him the confidence, "the naive confidence" as he puts it himself, to go through two years of the Architectural Association School (AA) to which he was accepted in the third year.

"..........so when I went to the AA I didn't feel frightened about things. One knew what one thought of as a possibility, and that was how it was, how it was borne on me that I could be an architect. There was a confidence at that stage, an amateur confidence, not an intellectual one, that removes fear of doing something."

The two years at the AA, he admits gave him a discipline even if it did not push him in any particular direction. "..... which is why it is so good. I mean people who were bad were left bad and people who were good were not interfered with............ I think it induced a discipline, like any school does......... you began to question what you thought and so on... I don't think that a formal education is a bad thing because it disciplines your mind." His approach to students and teaching is benign and sympathetic tempered by an assumption that they were doing what they believe in. 

Geoffrey Bawa's first experiment with architecture was the garden at Lunuganga, which he started after his 'grand tour'. This, more than anything else he has done shows his inimitable personal approach to the moulding of his immediate surroundings for pleasure. The essence of the garden predates his architectural training and nurtured his attitude to an architecture without an overtly theoretical standpoint. 

The surroundings and in this case the landscape that he moulded, are seen as something to be directly enjoyed. The natural environment is seen almost like clay is to a sculptor. This is then moulded within its physical limits to produce a series of pleasing vistas, views and spaces. With a simple geometric intervention, sometimes a mere line, Bawa 'civilises' the wildest stretch of jungle, and with the careful placing of an artifact, whole mountainsides are brought into focus. In creating the particular view, the whole is not forgotten. The garden is a carefully modulated configuration of space that allows for a variety of experiences, moods and even social possibilities. In a sense, it is the social possibility that was the initial spark that led to the unveiling of this garden from the wildness of mixed low-country jungle and rubber plantation. 

Some spaces are clearly reminiscent of English country houses, the life of which he had ample experience with friends in Cambridge. The garden was an attempt to "...create something... allied to that sort of world, not recreate that world - because it was a different world, you could not do it - be allied to it, mentally allied to it ... it was not tied up to any social structure except people enjoying themselves within their capability... which was not alien at all to the life I led before I went to England, at Kimbulapitiya (estate of his grandfather) and other places. It was marvellous sitting in this long verandah after lunch having endless conversations".

Geoffrey Bawa's approach to architecture, being one of direct experience and thought for the life within the sequences of space that he creates, gives his buildings a humanistic quality. None of them are attempts to engage the mind in clever architectural puzzles but provide a background in which life can be lived. This humanist element also extends to his other buildings in how the essential drama of a situation is enacted within the building or landscape. For instance the lobby at the Triton hotel is swept by driving rain during the southwest monsoon, and an army of staff putting up protective tats is part of the event that is a consequence of the building. This is not particularly intentional, but Bawa is aware of the consequences of his action and sees it as part of the total picture of life as represented in the building.

Essentially the architecture of Geoffrey Bawa can be seen as making interventions in what is already there in a natural landscape or as a sequence of necessary social events in a building.

"I like human intervention, ...like in a landscape when people contrive to mould it to their moods."

Intervention directly in the landscape is done in many ways to make it part of an intended space or vista. In Lunuganga, a pot placed on a hill in the middle distance, brings an entire hillside and dagaba into focus in one vista. At the Triton hotel, a boat placed between the edge of the pool and the sea creates an illusion of the sea sweeping into the lobby. The immediate space of concern and the surrounding landscape as seen from it, is made into a single continuum.

This same attitude to landscaping, that is, creating a sequence or configuration of spaces that is pleasing in itself, is also the same approach Bawa has to designing his buildings. In his hotel project in Kandalama, off Dambulla, he has created a strict austere building which stands in a dramatic landscape only as a few vertical lines and horizontal planes. The strict geometry and total lack of decoration accentuates the landscape and visually brings it into the building. Space is always seen as a continuum. 

All spaces immediately adjacent, whether directly used or not, are involved in the design. Sheltered and unsheltered space blends almost seamlessly and the room stretches out into the landscape. With the attitude to architecture being one of creating configurations of space that give pleasure whilst fulfilling the literal functional needs, Bawa never approaches a building by thinking of its form first. In design he is sceptical about seeing a building as a symbol and only sees it as a feeling of going through. Shown a recent design for an airport that had a strong form and asked if he could do it ...

"... I don't know, ...I can never imagine it as a symbol, I can imagine it as a plan or a feeling of going through to an aeroplane. The final form comes from doing it, actually walking through....l have always been against making a shape and having to be restricted by it". Even when designing the Sri Lankan Parliament, his most symbolic of buildings, his approach was one of imagining various sequences of movement through the complex. The result, in its essential asymmetric form, is much the same as its historic predecessors in the form of the royal and monastic buildings of Sri Lanka.

The direct non-formal approach to architecture is seen not only in the design aspect but also in the execution of his work. For Bawa, ultimate bliss is to see and participate directly on a site, from the inception of the project. In his mind this allows for the harnessing of the potential of the site to the fullest. 

In an early project - Polontalawa - Bawa and Ulrik Plesner, a partner and close friend..." ... discovered a spot full of boulders and we both said how excellent and splendid it would be to build a house here. So we pulled some strings and sticks, brought some chairs and sandwiches, and built it with a contractor who followed every gesture of our hands". 

This direct exploitation of the available potential of a particular building site, which extends even to the attitude Bawa has to the materials he uses has resulted in an eclectic collection of works that is in keeping with his experiential approach to architecture. A close look at all the buildings that he has been involved with, shows a great variety of forms and attitudes to materials. His earliest buildings, done through the firm of Edwards, Ried and Begg of which he became a partner on his return from the AA, shows a text book approach to architecture. St. Thomas' College, Bishop's College use breis-soleil and wide concrete beams holding simple asbestos roofs. These early experiments made use of the ideas he was exposed to at the AA.

"For St.Thomas' there was a possibility of using reinforced concrete, which I was trained to do in a certain way and decorate in a certain way, using people who could, like Anil, who was a good sculptor, ...it was just using up all the knowledge and the capabilities to the fullest. There was Sahabdeen (a master mason), there was Anil and there was concrete". From these early experiments and experiences with frame structures, Bawa slipped easily into the use of local materials which were available around him and the assembly of which was not conceptually dissimilar to the modernist traditions.

At the farm school he built in Hanwella for the Good Shepherd Congregation, in 1966, Bawa built a humane but modern complex of buildings using available local skills and materials - brick, plaster, coconut rafters and jungle posts. Mosaic work of broken plates donated by the nearby ceramic factory covers the walls. Being a training school for orphaned girls who were expected to return to their respective communities with the useful skills of farming, the buildings also showed them a way of building and living that they could carry with them. 

Bawa has always used the skills of the people around him to great advantage - the mind of his brilliant engineer partner, Dr. Poologasundaram, and a whole host of other architects and designers whose collaboration Bawa enjoyed and used extensively in his work. Ena de Silva, Laki Senanayake, Barbara Sansoni are just a few of those personalities who have in their own right made an impact on the post-independence culture of Sri Lanka. Looking in retrospect, at the time in which they worked it appears that there was a conscious and concerted effort in developing the indigenous crafts, introducing new ones and interpreting them in Sri Lankan terms. The essential catalyst for this was the stringent economic measures brought about by the socialist policies of the government of the time, where imports were prohibited and foreign travel was restricted. Using each other as sounding boards, this group of people proceeded to enjoy themselves doing what they thought was appropriate at the time. Their efforts together with that of many other artistes of the period, like painter George Keyt, dancers Chitrasena and Vajira, and writer Martin Wickremasinghe, effected perhaps the most important change in the way people of the country looked at their culture in the years following colonial rule. 

Geoffrey Bawa has always been shy of talking about his work and will always insist on experiencing it. This is because of the way he has conceptualised his creations. In a deeper sense however, he represents the true modernist. Form follows function, not in a symbolic sense, representing function, but a form that truly articulates space as a function of movement and experience enveloped in the materials and skills available around him.