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One
man's wondrous creations The most remarkable thing about Geoffrey Bawa is not his massive and pervasive influence on Sri Lankan architecture. It's the fact that he amounted to anything at all. The odds were
against him from the start. Born in 1919, Geoffrey Bawa grew up
in circumstances of wealth and privilege that seem outrageous today,
accustomed though we have become to the extravagant follies of arms-dealers
and kleptocrats. His half-Muslim, half-Burgher family belonged to
a class so coddled and deracinated it seemed to float above Colonial
Ceylonese society in a cloud of Chanel-scented idleness. Geoffrey and
his brother Bevis were raised in the expectation of never having
to lift a finger for themselves as long as they lived. Their boyhood
was a dream of town houses and country mansions, strings of horses
and squadrons of domestics, sailor suits and slow boats to China.
As soon as Geoffrey learned to drive, his mother bought him a Rolls-Royce. This kind of
background is hardly calculated to promote self-reliance or the
desire to make one's mark upon the world. Geoffrey had neither.
He studied English at Cambridge, which to him meant 'having to read
all the books one was going to read anyway', and qualified as a
barrister not because he had any interest in the law, but because
it was agreed that young men of good family must have a career.
He spent little time at his practice, preferring to swan round Colombo
in his Rolls-Royce convertible, silk scarf trailing in the wind,
like some elongated Isadora. He was, by his own admission, such
a bad lawyer that he feared innocent men would be jailed or hanged
as a result of his incompetence. He wasn't much good at anything
else either; apart from a decidedly unpatrician knack for fixing
cars, he had no practical skills whatsoever. So far, then,
so chinless wonder. But during the 1950s, while Ceylon was going
through its first post-Independence upheavals, a kind of sympathetic
revolution seemed to take place inside Geoffrey Bawa. The dilettante
lawyer, the effete social butterfly, suddenly transformed himself
into a brilliant architect. A suspicious
lack of curiosity about the cause of this transformation is the
first of two failures of nerve that mar David Robson's otherwise
excellent, indeed monumental book, Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works.
What prompted
this great change in Bawa? Some traumatic experience, the loss of
someone near and dear? An artistic epiphany of some kind? Or the
prescient intuition that, in post-Independence Ceylon, the privileges
of the old moneyed class would be stripped away and everybody forced
to fend for himself? Robson refuses to be drawn. All we learn is
that in 1951 Bawa received his first commission, failed to execute
it because of his lack of technical knowledge and proceeded to make
good that lack by revisiting England to study and qualify as an
architect. He returned to Colombo, joined Edwards, Reid & Begg
in 1958 and never looked back. Robson's book
is part biography, part architectural record. Both are comprehensively
documented and illustrated; this book is certain to become the standard
reference work on Geoffrey Bawa. It is intelligently and thoughtfully
laid out, with chronologically-ordered sections dealing with successive
stages of Bawa's life and career. Each section commences with several
pages of biography, helpfully printed on yellow paper, followed
by an extensive portfolio of key projects undertaken by the architect
during that phase of his career. Photographs
and original drawings abound. This reviewer found it most rewarding
to use the biographical chapters as an index to the portfolio, turning
to the latter to learn more about a particular building mentioned
in the former. Careful cross-referencing makes this easy; for a
non-architect, it is probably the best way to digest the vast mass
of material presented here. Leafing through
the volume in this fashion, one is drawn to the conclusion that
every noteworthy building erected in Sri Lanka since 1960 was a
Bawa design. On page after page, a comfortable majority of the country's
finest private and public structures are revealed to be the work
of one extraordinary man. This reviewer is not unfamiliar with Bawa's
oeuvre; but was surprised, all the same, by how many admired buildings,
familiar in some cases since childhood, turn out to be Bawa's. The
quality and extent of the man's work are rarely fully comprehended,
even by his acolytes; consequently, this book has the power to astonish. Early in his
career, Bawa revolutionized the Sri Lankan concept of urban living
space, turning houses in on themselves to make the most of limited
building plots and subverting the distinction between indoors and
outdoors. Working in the parlous economic conditions of the Sixties
and early Seventies, he was forced to use cheap local materials
and finishes and made a virtue out of necessity by highlighting
instead of disguising them - a coup de theatre that was to lay him
open to accusations of 'vernacularism' in later years. He also drew
inspiration from the topographically-governed aesthetic of ancient
Sinhalese architecture, with its tropisms toward landscape and water.
Bawa continued to develop these themes throughout his career, refining
them to a point where some of his late works are almost indistinguishable
from the landscape around them. A less comfortable
conclusion forced upon the reader is that Geoffrey Bawa, child of
wealth and privilege, became, as an architect, the unquestioning
servant of wealth and privilege, utterly careless of its provenance.
In spite of Robson's efforts to balance the account with descriptions
of the commissions Bawa undertook, often free, for the Catholic
Church, it is hard not to sense a moral vacuum at the centre of
his work. Throughout the years of his practice, Sri Lanka has remained
a poverty-stricken, misgoverned, socially fractured nation. The
great architect (and he is indeed a great architect) bothered himself
with none of that. A former partner, Valentine Gunasekera, accused
him of pandering to the extravagance of the walauwwe, or manorial,
classes. Sadly, it didn't end there. To Sri Lankans, the names of
many of the clients whose homes and follies are featured in this
book will be familiar - and repugnant. It is Bawa's
earlier buildings that Robson most admires. Though he speaks almost
as highly of certain mature works, such as the Kandalama Hotel and
the Jayawardena house at Mirissa, his nominee for Bawa's chef-d'oeuvre
is the Bentota Beach Hotel, which he accuses the present owners
of having barbarized and defaced. It is true that, while the late
Seventies and the Eighties were financially rewarding years for
Bawa, who began to receive large public and private commissions
- hotels, office-blocks, the Sri Lankan Houses of Parliament - at
this time, his creativity seemed to suffer from the demands made
on it by powerful corporate and State clients. Later, in the
evening of his career, he would experience a resurgence of his powers,
and the book's portfolio of commissioned works ends on a high note:
Pradeep and Shan Jayawardena's pleasure-pavilion on the coast at
Mirissa, a structure so evanescent it literally vanishes from certain
angles, realizing Bawa's aesthetic dictum - the landscape is pre-eminent
- to Zen-like perfection. The last two works featured in the book are Bawa's own homes in Colombo and Bentota, which have been in a process of constant evolution ever since he acquired them. Leafing through this portion of the book, one has plenty of opportunity - and incentive - to reflect on the private Geoffrey Bawa: a shy, introverted man, reticent to the point of evasiveness, who has remained, officially at least, a singleton all his life. And this brings
us to the second of those failures of nerve earlier mentioned. For
an artist, work and love are eternally entangled; private and professional
life inseparable. But apart from a fleeting reference to a young
Bawa 'coming to terms with his sexuality' as a student at Cambridge,
we learn nothing from Robson about this side of the architect's
life - no accounts of youthful escapades and flirtations, no mention
of lovers or life partners; barely any hint, indeed, that Bawa is
an emotional or sexual creature at all. That kind of
thing might be all very well for the parlours and coffee-tables
of the walauwwe classes, but for a scholarly biography that aspires
to definitiveness it simply will not wash. Nobody needs or wants
a tabloid parade, but to completely ignore this vital side of a
great man is to ill-serve his greatness, because it implies that
he is not, in this vital aspect of humanity, a man at all. How squeamishly
Victorian. So this otherwise excellent and comprehensive book remains incomplete in one key respect, and the definitive biography of Geoffrey Bawa must await another, braver author. But don't let that put you off; this is still a magnificent book. Buy it, and marvel at the achievements of the man who might just be, no kidding, the greatest living Sri Lankan. Little
huts along the way ambalama (1681).
Although the definition of ambalama to be carried in the OED3 had
been drafted and a number of illustrative quotations assembled at
the time this was written, the entry is unlikely to make an appearance
in either electronic or print form for some years. This is due to
the non-alphabetical fashion in which the dictionary is being revised.
Therefore, I provide a temporary definition: "In Sri Lanka,
a pillared and mostly open-sided wayside shelter for travellers." On the evidence
of the assembled illustrative quotations, the editors initially
chose ambalam (the Sinhala plural) as the headword for the draft
entry. (It has to be understood that the editors are concerned with
presenting the word in its most common form in English, rather than
its correct form in Sinhala.) However, the selection of illustrative
quotations available to the editors was insufficient to represent
fully the history of the word, for ambalama is the predominant form,
especially during the twentieth century. On the basis of the historical
evidence presented, it is likely the headword will be changed to
ambalama before the entry is published. While ambalama
was at one time in common use, its currency has declined along with
the charitable concept of providing wayfarers with free lodging.
Being an historical word, the inclusion of ambalama at this juncture
might appear questionable. The editors, though, while looking primarily
for new words, are also anxious to net so-called new old words from
prior centuries that have so far escaped inclusion. The earliest
reference to ambalama in the OED file is by Charles Pridham from
An Historical, Political and Statistical Account of Ceylon (1849:II.865):
"The rest-houses of Ceylon, there called ambulams, in India
choultries, are subject to the control of Government, and under
the management of post-holders, who receive a certain per centage
on every article they supply to the traveller. They vary greatly
in accommodation; those in the remoter districts are mere mud huts,
the floors of which are generally coated with cow dung to keep off
insects, and here the traveller is subject to a wholesome self-denial." Robert Knox,
however, antedates this reference by 170 years employing the intriguing
form amblomb in An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1681:99): "At
their leisure when their affairs will permit, they commonly meet
at places built for strangers and way-faring men to lodge in, in
their Language called Amblomb, where they sit chewing Betel, and
looking one upon the other very gravely and solidly, discoursing
concerning the Affairs at court, between the King and the great
Men; and what Employment the People of the City are busied about." Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
gives a thorough description in Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908:116)
covering the architecture of this simple structure, the social and
religious customs behind its construction, the manner in which it
was shared by travellers, and its ancillary utilisation. Note that
Coomaraswamy demonstrates the correct singular and plural usage
of the word: "...the ambalama or wayside shelter. Of these
there were many at no great distance apart on the frequented paths,
and better ones in each village, erected by all its villagers, or
by one man (or even a woman), anxious to perform so meritorious
an act... The smallest ambalama consisted of a foundation of four
beams to sit upon, with four posts at the corners and a thatched
roof; the better ones had more pillars and were sometimes divided
into compartments for the convenience of those desirous of spending
the night there. But a single-roomed ambalama could be sub-divided
for the sake of privacy by means of a pili-vela consisting of two
cords of niyanda fibre passed through a central block; the four
ends of the cords being fastened in the four corners of the room,
and clothes hung over the cords themselves, the room was conveniently
divided into four separate compartments. "...the
ambalama served not only as a halting place for strangers, but was
generally resorted to for exchange of news and a quiet chew; it
served also as a meeting place for the village tribunal or gamsabhava,
and was thus intimately associated with the life of the village
community." Michael Ondaatje,
writing in Anil's Ghost (2000:102), provides the postdating reference:
"The wooden ambalama felt like a raft or four-poster bed drifting
in the black clearing." choultry (1698).
"A place for the reception and accommodation of travellers;
an inn, caravanserai; also used for the transaction of public business
(Yule)." During the
initial years of British rule the military personnel posted to the
Island from Madras brought a number of Anglo-Indian words with them,
such as batta, verandah, and choultry. As one of these soldiers,
(Captain) Robert Percival, remarks in An Account of the Island of
Ceylon (1803:56): "They have here built for their accommodation
a choultry, or stone barracks, which also serves for the reception
of occasional travellers." This word is
on the periphery of the lexicon, but is included as it was used
as a synonym for both ambalama and rest-house in the nineteenth
century. cutcherry (1610).
"Anglo-Indian. An office of administration, a court-house.
Also the business office of an indigo-planter, etc." The only reference
given in the OED2 with relevance to Sri Lanka is by Leonard Woolf
from The Village in the Jungle (1913:179): "He was standing...
frightened, on the Kachcheri verandah." Needless to
say, there are much earlier references from English literature pertaining
to Sri Lanka. For instance, D'Oyly (1810[1917]:5) writes: "Recommends
that 2 Cutcherry Lascorins be stationed, as formerly, at Avissahawella." pandal (1717).
"East Indies. [Adopted from Tamil pendal shed.] A shed, booth,
or arbour, especially for temporary use." There are two
late 20th century references with relevance to Sri Lanka. The first
is from the Housewife of February 19, 1962: "It was decided
to hold the reception at the 39th Lane sports club, where there
was ample room for two large pandals to be erected." The other
is from the Weekend of August 8, 1972: "Permanent pandals will
be built to decorate the entrances to sacred cities." Once again,
there are much earlier references from English literature pertaining
to Sri Lanka. My favourite from the nineteenth century is by John
Capper from The Duke of Edinburgh in Ceylon (1871:6): "There
were enough cocoa-nuts in and about that pandhal of the Southern
Province to keep the Hultsdorf oil-mills at work for a week, with
steam up." rest-house
(1807). "In India, Malaysia or Africa, a building in which
travellers may obtain rest and shelter; a choultry, a dawk-bungalow." The earliest
reference given in the dictionary, and the only one from English
literature pertaining to Sri Lanka, is by Cordiner (1807:1.205):
"The children assemble in the rest-house, as their parish school
has fallen a sacrifice to the ravages of time." Of course there are many references throughout English literature pertaining to Sri Lanka. Another early one is by D'Oyly (1810[1917]:2): "The Disawe is in a Rest House on the other Side of the River near the Road, hearing the People's Complaints & Cases."
The main private
bus stand is on Bastian Mawatha, the people's bus services are operated
from the old CTB bus terminal at Bodhiraja Mawatha and Olcott Mawatha,
while a third bus terminal handles both PTS and private services
which are north-bound from a terminal at Saunders Place. All these sites
taken together, account for nearly 20 acres of valuable land. The city of
Colombo has developed from the humble harbour enclave that handled
the export-import trade to a metropolitan centre serving the whole
nation. The selection
of Pettah for the CBT is attributed mainly to the convergence of
the national road network there. It is accessible
from all provincial and district capitals in the country. People
travel a distance of 75- 100 km for employment daily, both by bus
and train. In the nearly 350 years of its evolution Colombo has inherited activities that are both appropriate and inappropriate to its position as the predominant national centre. The appropriate
activities are the financial and banking services, national health
services, cultural and recreational activities and personal services.
These activities can stand the high land values of the locations
in the heart of the city. However, retail
trading activities, slums and shanties and wholesale trading dependent
on heavy traffic, are inappropriate for a city centre owing to their
inability to develop the premises in which they are operated for
a high floor area ratio. These inappropriate
activities continue owing to the other activities to which the existence
of the CBT is fundamental. Transport to
the city centre is provided by both road and rail. But the latter's
contribution is in the region of 25%. If the transport facility,
primarily, the bus terminal can be relocated, the links of the externalities
can be severed. This will lead
to the development of Fort and Pettah into a modern city centre.
For this purpose the relocation of the CBT is of primary importance.
The selection
of a new location for the CBT should be on the following criteria. 1. Obtaining
a plot of land of about 15 -20 acres from where all buses that presently
operate from three locations can operate: The land should be contiguous
and state-owned. The only place that offers such a facility is Borella.
The area just
behind the present dwarf bus-stand is occupied by Departments of
Police, Prisons, Postal and Government Printer. Some of them have
already been identified for relocation. 2. Convergence
of all national roads: With the completion of Baseline Road, Borella
matures to this position. 3. Proximity
to rail connections: Both Dematagoda and Maradana are in close proximity
to Borella. This will reduce the number of people arriving at Fort
station. Maradana is a relatively under-utilized station at present.
Presently Maradana
handles 16.1% of rail traffic while Fort and Slave Island handle
25 % and 23.8% respectively. 4. The capacity
to be a central place to other centres both in the city and outside
it: Borella is well linked to all centres. 5. Proximity
to all national level services: Borella is equally well located
for this purpose. The potential
of Borella as the alternative transport centre to Pettah was first
highlighted in the Outline Regional Structure Plan for Colombo Metropolitan
area in 1994 by the UDA. The major plus
points of relocating the CBT to Borella are :- 1. A large extent of prime land will be available for modern development in the city. 2. The clientele patronizing the retail trade and pavement hawkers will be reduced and these activities will have to agree to a voluntary out-movement from the city centre. It will facilitate
the relocation of wholesale traders in the Fourth and Fifth Cross
streets at Orugodawatta. Pavement hawkers can be located on the
Borella-Maradana Road on widened pavements in suitable stalls. This
will attract at least some of them to the semi-formal sector. 3. It will
pave the way for large scale redevelopment of properties in the
city, creating more permanent and temporary employment opportunities. 4. Heavy traffic
now entering the heart of the city will reduce and the social position
of the people now patronizing Pettah and Fort area will change.
It will create a demand for supermarkets instead of retail trade
stalls. 5. This will
have a great impact on the moving shanty population who mainly depend
on wholesale and retail trading activities etc. Some of them, employed
in the semi-formal sector will volunteer to move out of the city
and this will make a good extent of land available for development
in the city. This type of indicative planning is essential in a
democracy in which all big and small people have voting power. This project
will help to deal with the present traffic congestion. The writer is former Director Planning, UDA. |
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Copyright © 2001 Wijeya Newspapers
Ltd. All rights reserved. |
