Geoffrey Bawa
(1919 - May 27, 2003) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Geoffrey Bawa |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Colombo |
| Nationality: |
Sri Lankan |
| Birth: |
1919 |
| Death: |
May 27, 2003 |
| Website: |
http://www.geoffreybawa.com |
| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
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Architect |
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Biography
| He studied English literature at the University of Cambridge and was admitted to the Bar in 1943. After some years travelling in the USA and Europe he returned to Sri Lanka where, in 1949, he bought Lunuganga at Bentota, on the west coast south of Colombo, and initiated what became a widely renowned garden. He then returned to England to study architecture at the Architectural Association, London, graduating in 1956. He joined the Colombo practice of Edward Reid & Begg (1958) and began a close collaboration with the Danish architect Ulrik Plesner (b 1930), one of its partners, which lasted until 1967.There are two distinct aspects to Bawas work. The first is an intensely personal flair for expressing what he called a subconscious residue of understanding left in the mind by all kinds of buildings and landscapes in Sri Lanka and abroad; this was the basis of his celebration of the local vernacular, which grew out of Portuguese, Dutch and British influences as well as indigenous models. The second is the element of dynamism in his buildings, which stems from his belief that a building, like a garden, can only be experienced by moving through it. Bawas European training is most evident in his early works, although even these bear a personal stamp that immediately relates them to local culture, context and climate. The tennis club-house (1959) at Ratnapura, on a steeply sloping site and with visually defined open rooms, reveals his readiness to rethink the environmental demands of a hot, humid climate. By contrast, the house for A. S. H. de Silva (1960), Colombo, is modernist in spirit and has a pinwheel plan with a garden-courtyard at its heart. The first commission in which Bawa had a comparatively free hand was the house (1962) in Colombo for Ena de Silva, the designer of batiks. It is built almost entirely of local materials, with a characteristic pantiled roof falling to an open colonnaded atrium. Two school buildings (1963) in Colombo indicate that he was not limited to this approach, however. St Thomas Preparatory School, Galle Road, and the classrooms for the Bishops School, Boyd Place, reveal his ability to use advanced technology in the pursuit of locally appropriate forms, with exposed precast concrete and cantilevered overhangs, as well as his constant endeavour to integrate his architecture with the work of local artists: the former has a giant mural by Anil Jayasuria and the latter have gold-leaf sculpture by Lyddia Diccini.From the mid-1960s Bawa became more widely known for a series of tourist hotels, beginning with the Blue Lagoon (1966), Negombo, where he also later built the Royal Oceanic Hotel (1987). Perhaps the best known are the Bentota Beach Hotel (1969), with a unique ceiling of batiks by Ena de Silva, and its simpler neighbour, the Serendib Hotel (1971), which completes the Bentota tourist centre. Bawas most important buildings, however, were completed in the 1980s: the serene Parliament Buildings (1982), Sri Jayawardenepura, Kotte, which he sited on an island in a manmade lake near Colombo; and the Science Faculties and Staff Residences (1984) at Ruhuna University, clinging to the hills of Matara. Both are mature examples of Bawas modern vernacular style.Bawa became president of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects in 1969 and was awarded its inaugural Gold Medal in 1982; he was elected an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1983. He designed a number of buildings outside Sri Lanka, notably the almost modernist twin glazed cubes of the Ceylon Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan, and the Madurai Club (1974), Madurai, in southern India, where the riven stone columns of the verandah refer as much to 12th-century Polonnaruwa as to the masonry traditions of south-east India. |
Samples of Work
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