GEOFFREY MANNING BAWA

RUBINA SHAUKAT 10031AC025

KIRTI JALAN 10031AC015

GEOFFREY MANNING BAWA Date of birth :July 23, 1919 Place of birth: Colombo Education and Career 1930-37:studied at Royal College, Colombo   1938-41:studied English at Cambridge   1942-44:studied Law in London    1946:worked briefly as a lawyer with Noel

Gratien 1951:worked as an assistant architect with HH

Reid at Edwards Reid and Begg in Prince Street,  Colombo   

1950-53:worked sporadically as a lawyer in Colombo  

 1954-57:studied at the Architectural Association in London   

1957:joined Edwards Reid and Begg as a junior partner   1958-65:worked in close association with Ulrik Plesne

1967-89:partner with Dr. K. Poologasundram in Edwards Reid Begg

1990-97:partner in Geoffrey Bawa Associates(after 1995 with Channa Daswatte)

AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS Pan Pacific Citation, Hawaii Chapter of the American

Institute of Architects (1967) President, Sri Lanka Institute of Architects (1969) Inaugural Gold Medal at the Silver Jubilee Celebration

of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects (1982) Heritage Award of Recognition, for “Outstanding

Architectural Design in the Tradition of Local Vernacular Architecture”, for the new Parliamentary Complex at Sri Jayawardenepura, Kotte from the Pacific Area Travel Association. (1983)

Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects Elected Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of

Architects (1983) Conferred title of Vidya Jothi (Light of Science) in the

Inaugural Honours List of the President of Sri Lanka (1985)

Teaching Fellowship at the Aga Khan Programme for Architecture, at MIT, Boston, USA (1986)

Conferred title Deshamanya (Pride of the Nation) in the Honours List of the President Sri Lanka (1993)

The Grate Master's Award 1996 incorporating South Asian Architecture Award (1996)

The Architect of the Year Award, India (1996) Asian Innovations Award, Bronze Award –

Architecture, Far Eastern Economic Review (1998) The Chairman's Award of the Aga Khan Award for

Architecture in recognition of a lifetime's achievement in and contribution to the field of architecture (2001)

Awarded Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa), University of Ruhuna (14 September 2002)

EXHIBITIONS AND PUBLICATIONS1. 1986: exhibition at the Royal Institute of Architects,

Londonpublication of “Geoffrey Bawa”, Brian Brace TaylorConcept Media, Singapore

2. 1991: publication of “Lunuganga”,  Geoffrey Bawa with Christoph Bon & Dominic Sansoni,  Times Editions, Singapore

3.  2002:publication of “Bawa the complete works”, David RobsonThames and Hudson, London

4. 2004:retrospective exhibition “Bawa – Architect of Sri Lanka”Deutches Architektur Museum, Frankfurt   2007:publication of “Beyond Bawa”, David RobsonThames and Hudson, London

FAMOUS WORKS

1. Number 11, Colombo.2. Sri lankan parliament building, kotte.3. Ena de Silva House, colombo.4. Ruhunu University, Matara.5. The kandalama hotel, dambulla.6. Jayawardene house, Mirissa.7. Garden at lunuganga, bentota.8. Bentota beach hotel.9. Blue water hotel, Wadduwa.10. Batujimbar Estate, Bali

IDEOLOGY

 He is the principal force behind what is today known globally as ‘tropical modernism’. Although best

known for his private houses and hotels, his portfolio also included schools and universities, factories and offices, public buildings and social buildings as well

as the new Sri Lanka Parliament.Bawa’s work is characterised by a sensitivity to site

and context. He produced “sustainable architecture” long before the term was coined, and had developed his own “regional modernist” stance well in advance

of the theoreticians. His designs broke down the barriers between inside and outside, between interior

design and landscape architecture and reduced buildings to a series of scenographically conceived

spaces separated by courtyards and gardens.

NUMBER 11 33RD LANE COLOMBO

NUMBER 11 33RD LANE COLOMBO, 1960-1970

The house in 33rd Lane is an essay in architectural

bricolage. In 1958 Bawa bought the third in a row of four small houses which lay along a short

cul-de-sac at the end of a narrow suburban lane and

converted it into a pied-à-terre with living room, bedroom, tiny kitchen and room for a servant.

When the fourth bungalow became vacant this was

colonized to serve as dining room and second living room.  Ten years later the remaining bungalows were acquired and

added into the composition and the first in the row was

demolished to be replaced by a four-storey tower.

The final result is an introspective labyrinth of rooms and garden courts which together create the illusion of

limitless space.  Words like inside and outside lose all meaning: here are rooms without roofs and roofs

without walls, all connected by a complex matrix of axes and internal vistas.

If the main part of the house is an evocation of a lost world of verandahs and courtyards assembled from a

rich collection of traditional devices and plundered artifacts, the new tower which rises above the car port

is nothing less than a reworking of Corb's Maison Citrohan and serves as a periscope which rises from a

shady nether world to give views out across the treetops towards the sea.

LUNUGANGA, BENTOTA,

LUNUGANGA, BENTOTA, 1948-1997

The garden at Lunuganga sits astride two low hills on a promontory which juts out into a brackish lagoon lying off the estuary of the Bentota River.the original bungalow still survives within its cocoon of added verandas, courtyards, and loggias.

Lunuganga was conceived as a scenographic sequence of spaces.  Visitors, confused and disoriented, are shepherded up the cascade of steps which lead to the south terrace of the house.The view southwards is framed by a corridor of trees and takes in the Hill, the lake beyond and a white Buddhist dagoba on a distant hilltop:  the eye runs down and up through a cone of space and leaps towards the temple and the sky.

This is not a garden of colourful flowers, neat borders and gurgling fountains:  it is a civilised wilderness, an

assemblage of tropical plants of different scale and texture, a composition of green on green, an ever

changing play of light and shade, a succession of hidden surprises and sudden vistas, a landscape of memories and ideas.  The whole of it can be taken in with a brisk fifteen-minute walk, but it requires days to explore its

every corner and appreciate its changing moods.Lunuganga now seems to be so established, so natural,

that it is hard to appreciate how much effort has gone into its creation.  But this is a work of art, not of nature;

it is the contrivance of a single mind and a hundred hands working together with nature to produce

something which is ‘super-natural’. Ignore it for a week and the paths will clog up leaves; leave it for a month

and the lawns will run wild; after a year the terraces will crumble and the jungle will return forever.

THE SRI LANKAN PARLIAMENT, KOTTE,

THE SRI LANKAN PARLIAMENT, KOTTE, 1979

In 1979 Bawa was asked to prepare designs for a new parliament to built at Kotte, about eight kilometers to the east of Colombo.  Having flown over the site Bawa proposed that the marshy valley of the Diyavanna Oya be flooded to create a lake of 120 hectares and that the new complex be built on a knoll of high ground which would become an island at the lake’s centre.Bawa conceived of the Parliament as an island capitol surrounded by a new garden city of parks and public buildings. Its cascade of copper roofs would first be seen from the approach road at a distance of two kilometers floating above the new lake at the end of the Diyavanna valley.

The design placed the main chamber in a central pavilion surrounded by a cluster of five satellite

pavilions.  Each pavilion is defined by its own umbrella roof of copper and seems to grow out of its own

plinth, although the plinths are actually connected to form a continuous ground and first floor.  The main

pavilion is symmetrical about an axis running north-south through the debating chamber, the Speaker's chair and the formal entrance portal.  But the power

of this axis and the scale of the main roof are diffused by the asymmetric arrangement of the lesser

pavilions around it.  As a result, the pavilions each retain a separate identity but join together to create a

single upward sweep of roofs. The use of copper in place of tile gives the roofs a thinness and the tent-

like quality of a stretched skin alluding perhaps to the fabled 'brazen roofs' of Anuradhapura. 

QUOTES

“Architecture cannot be totally explained but must be experienced . . . ”

-- Geoffrey Bawa

CONCLUSIONThe Sri Lankan Architect Geoffrey Bawa is now regarded as having been

one of the most important and influential Asian architects of the 20th century. His international standing was finally confirmed in 2001 when

he received the special chairman’s award in the eighth cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.Bawa was born in 1919 and came late

to architecture, only qualifying in 1957 at the age of thirty-eight, but he soon established himself as Sri Lanka’s most prolific and inventive architect, laying down a canon of prototypes for buildings in a tropical Asian context. Although best known for his private houses and hotels,

his portfolio also included schools and universities, factories and offices, public buildings and social buildings. One of his most striking

achievements is his own garden at Lunuganga which he fashioned from an abandoned rubber estate. This project occupied him for fifty

years, and he used it as a test bed for his emerging ideas. The result is a series of outdoor rooms conceived with an exquisite sense of theatre as a civilized wilderness on a quiet backwater in the greater garden of

Sri Lanka.