The protagonist of today’s article is unfamiliar to many, and I had never heard of Geoffrey Bawa either until a few months ago. However, academic reasons led me to do research on an architect who could somehow allow us to confront something new, not in the temporal sense, but in a cultural one, namely, a different context from the European-Western one. Geoffrey Bawa (1919, Colombo – 2013, Colombo) was a Sri Lankan architect, and one of the most influential of the second half of the 20th century in South Asia. His work was a steady attempt to harmonize seemingly distant and anachronistic trends and cultures into an organic whole, driven by an inner need to find a balance between the different influences he had been exposed to throughout his life.
As a matter of fact, from Bawa’s biography written by David Robson, a number of factors emerge that led Bawa to almost feel like a formless being, that is, confused about who he was. Consider, for example, his mixed ancestry, half Asian and half European. While there were no problems with this until the age of 17, things changed as he moved to England to study at Cambridge University. The contrast between the two origins emerged disruptively in the seven years he spent on the British island. On the one hand, Bawa, skeptical of his classmates’ reaction about his Asian origins, preferred to omit it, partly because he appeared to be a European for all intents and purposes – he was white, tall, blond. On the other hand, living fully in England, among literary and artistic salons, intense friendships, and the opportunity to express his homosexuality, led Bawa to despise his Sri Lankan origins. But another important aspect is the fact that Bawa became an architect at the age of 38. This was because, although he always showed a great passion for art, architecture and design, he pursued a career as a lawyer to follow a family tradition. After that, the issue of the island of Ceylon is also to be considered: throughout history, it had been subjected to Arab, Indian and Chinese influences, not to mention the Portuguese, Dutch and British ones from the colonial era. In 1948, the island gained independence from the British crown, but internal tensions due to the coexistence of populations so different in culture led to a bitter civil war in the following decades, which continues to this day and has headed the country to a severe economic recession. All these reasons led Bawa to suffer numerous identity crises that he tried to investigate through the material approach that architecture could offer.
Some projects made by Geoffrey Bawa
Certainly, variety and fertility have characterized Bawa’s work. He has designed more than fifty houses, about thirty hotels and resorts, and then social, educational, religious and public buildings, such as the current Sri Lankan parliament. However, in this article I’d like to tell you about house number 11, located in Colombo. This building was the house where Bawa lived, but also his studio, his personal workshop and his art gallery. Moreover, house number 11 has also a peculiar history: over a period of about forty years, it has undergone continuous radical changes in space and design. In fact, Bawa was guided by the idea that “building” and “dwelling” were the two sides of the coin that represented the implementation of building, that is the experience of architectural space as a function of time. Ultimately, house number 11 may represent a true organic synthesis of what the idea of home was for Bawa.
Detail of Lunuganga Gardens
To build, to plant, whatever you intend,
‘Of the use of Riches’, Alexander Pope
To rear the Column, or the arch to Bend,
To swell the Terrace, or to sink the Grot;
In all, let Nature never be forgot.
[…] Consult the Genius of the Place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
What Pope called the ‘genius of the place’, in ancient Rome was called the ‘genius loci’ and represented the protective spirit of the place, which we can refer to as the set of socio-cultural and natural characteristics that distinguish a certain site. In general, then, we can say ‘the local context’, what the architect, critic and architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz defined as ‘[…] that ‘opposite’ with which man must come to terms in order to acquire the possibility of dwelling’. This consideration of the local context, and thus its material and immaterial characteristics, has been a crucial point in Bawa’s work, and stands out emblematically in house number 11, as much in the building’s direct relationship with its natural surroundings as in its design.
House no. 11 main facade
According to David Robson, Bawa’s biographer: ‘[The house] is an introspective labyrinth of rooms and garden courts that together create an illusion of endless space on what is, in reality, a tiny suburban plot. 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’. House number 11 today looks like a complex of pavilions, verandas, inner courtyards, loggias and terraces. These internal openings and connections to the outside world are the result of the sensitivity that Bawa showed to the natural environment. I believe that Bawa did not see the house as a bubble within the world, but rather as an emblem of human living the world. In fact, his work appears as an attempt to experience the world and reflect on his own being through architecture. He particularly appreciated the solution offered by the British colonial bungalow set in extensive gardens, but the need to work on ever-smaller plots of land due to increasing urban densification led Bawa to break down the colonial bungalow into its main components and turn it upside down, metaphorically and literally, with the garden being fragmented and brought inside the building. Moving around the house, there is a sense of continuity between inside and outside that was first achieved through the veranda, which plays the role of a medium between the two environments. According to University College London professor Tariq Jazeel: ‘[One perceives inside an] illusion of spaciousness and connection to the outside [that] is accentuated by the alignment of doors and windows such that long through-vistas are created throughout the property’.
Bawa was by instinct a bioclimatic designer. Where possible, he used locally produced materials and local technologies. It even happened that he used rubble from other buildings to make floors and walls. House number 11 was built so that it cooled naturally through chimney and cross-ventilation systems, and the use of wood and clay plaster provided thermal insulation and humidity absorption. Bawa then considered the ferocity of the tropical sun and introduced light sparingly, indirectly, using the reflection of sunlight on the white walls and foliage as a filter.
Ground floor main living room
Geoffrey Bawa’s bedroom
In creating interior settings with the help of vegetation, Bawa let the landscape itself participate, free to invade the interior. It is curious to know that he adapted the structural elements of the building over time to the changes that the vegetation underwent. His attention to planting can be clearly seen in the drawings: his assistants recalled when in the office they stopped drawing any generic tree and started drawing certain plant species. But speaking of drawings, it’s important to know how Bawa paid very little attention to those relating to the design of houses. Apart from initial drafts, the final drawings were usually made when the construction of the building was finished, almost as if he wanted to use the drawings not to give guidelines on how to put the building up, but to show users how it would look once the planting had taken over. This was because the architect subordinated theory to practice, structural and design choices to his eye and sensibility.
Ena De Silva House drawing
However, the consideration of the local context is particularly evident inside the house: it appears as an evocation of a lost world in which it’s possible to breathe in the island’s rich history and cultural diversity. This is thanks to the presence of ancient artifacts recovered from South Asia, as well as Dutch and British colonial-era furniture and local contemporary artworks. Anyway, Bawa was also committed to modernist ideals, which allowed him to find new ways to resolve the contradictions inherent in the dialogue between the local and the global spheres. After all, the tower of the house is nothing more than a reworking of Le Corbusier’s Maison Citrohan and, moreover, as we will see in a moment, modern design pieces ranging from Knoll to Eames can be found in almost every room of the house, along with Bawa’s own reworkings and projects, such as the terrace or dining room chairs, for instance.
Courtyard at the end of the entrance corridor
Be that as it may, the belief that design must begin with an assessment of context has made Bawa, in the opinion of some critics, a ‘regionalist’. According to Kenneth Frampton, the leading theorist of Critical Regionalism, it is, recalling Paul Ricoeur, a culture of ‘[…] becoming modern and going back to the sources; […] reviving a dormant old civilisation and participating in universal civilisation’. In other words, Critical Regionalism, unlike postmodernism, rather than thinking hastily about the past, attempted a re-foundation of the modern, deeming it an ‘unfinished project’, in the words of Jürgen Habermas, one of the leading exponents of the Frankfurt School. Precisely, according to Habermas, in this context, the adoption of efficiency parameters does not prevail in evaluating the spaces and materials of architecture, but rather the development of ‘[…] a strong culture charged with identity, which nevertheless maintains an open contact with universal technique’ is sought. However, Bawa did not feel like a regionalist, and he did not appreciate theories about architecture, stating that it could not be explained, but only experienced. When Malaysian architect Jimmy Lim asked Bawa about regionalism in a rare interview in 1989, Bawa replied: ‘I have begun to think that regionalism is what happens automatically, coming out from the needs of a place… If you take local materials and the general feel of the place into account, the resultant building automatically becomes regional. I do not make it regional, and I do not take regionalism as a creed. […] What frightens me is that regionalism is thought to be a lessening of civilization’.
Staircase leading to the first floor, entrance door to the house and a courtyard on the ground floor
Bawa was a playful designer and worked in much the same way as a set designer: with the conviction that architecture should be experienced dynamically by moving through it, he conceived each project as a series of interconnected tableaux, understood in theatrical or cinematic terms. The house plan was manipulated to control the sequence of discovery so that each space contained within it the anticipation of other spaces. Views were then hidden, partially revealed, or kept in reserve. Its purpose was to confuse, to arouse and, finally, to reveal. Robson wrote: ‘[…] in his house on 33rd […] the entire sequence from the front door to the living room is a piece of theater, leading the visitor to the very heart of the plan in a state of growing anticipation’. If we then make a comparison between the experience of architecture and reading a text, we could say that walking through the spaces designed by Bawa is perhaps similar to some modernist literary texts in their ‘delayed decoding’, as historian and literary critic Ian Watt says: it indicates the possibility to recognize the value and meaning of a dense, sensory set of details only by going on reading the text, that is, only by accepting the ‘delay’ between the first sensory approach to the details and the subsequent recognition of its meaning. Bawa’s architectural space produces a similar effect, since only the sense of movement can make it possible to break the sensory constraints and grasp the value and meaning of details. What we are talking about here doesn’t simply have to do with Bawa’s playful attitude towards ‘architectural composition’, but above all with his idea of ‘home’, ‘dwelling’ and ‘spatial experience as a function of time’. In the essay Building Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger expounds a thesis that considers the three things as a joint ontological endeavor: to the German philosopher, building and dwelling the house would represent a poetic act by which man continually reinterprets the meaning of his being in relation to the world. In order to reinterpret himself, Bawa thought of the interior as a set of symbols that bound him almost unconsciously to ancient times, to the influences he had met during his life, to a discussion on the values of his time, and then drew through them an understanding or a meaning regarding his relationship with the world.
Bollingen Tower, built by C. G. Jung
At this point, we might venture an analogy with Jung’s studies regarding ‘individuation’, but a comparison with something concrete, namely the Tower of Bollingen, Switzerland, which Jung built for himself, would be for sure more effective. About this small stone castle Jung wrote in Memories Dreams Reflections: ‘From the beginning I felt the Tower as a place […] in which I could become what I was, am and will be. […] Only later I saw what had arisen and succeeded as a significant figure: a symbol of psychic totality. […] In Bollingen I find myself in my truest nature, in that which deeply expresses myself. I am, as it were, the very ancient child of the mother’. The parallel between Bawa’s house number 11 and Jung’s Bollingen Tower is evident when we consider that Bawa declared to his biographer Robson that he had ‘lived [in his houses] in many centuries simultaneously’, that he ‘always looked to the past for the help that previous answers can give’ and that no specific meaning could be attributed to a building, because the true meaning could only develop and change over time in the mind of the person who used, inhabited and altered the building, according to the needs of their own being.
Living room on ground floor
In making the space so meaningful, Bawa used what design historian Robin Jones defined as ‘architectural bricolage’. In La pensée sauvage, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss defined the bricolage as the art of using objects that one has at hand and recombining them to create something new, mythological narratives. Let’s also recall how, according to Jung, myths function as works of creative understanding of our psyche. The bricoleur then works based on what he has at his disposal, he acts by distinctions and juxtapositions, always constructing new symbolic narratives, which facilitate his understanding of the world, and he proceeds by constantly making and remaking the point, always disposing of the given tools in a new and different way, being at the mercy of circumstances. Bawa’s bricolage of domestic objects invokes personal memory by means of local and colonial antique furniture, Western modernist objects and contemporary Sri Lankan artworks. Regarding this last point, if we consider that Bawa, besides his assistants, engineers and designers, also gathered a group of young local artists around him, we understand how he aimed at creating a total work of art through each project.
Garage entrance door and interior
The technique of bricolage can be seen in various rooms of the house. One example is the garage, whose door and gate have motifs reminiscent of the mashrabiyya, that is the Arabian window that represents a natural ventilation device, and whose interior features a Rolls Royce and a Mercedes-Benz from the 1920s accompanied by a batik, that is a painting on fabric, reinterpreting the wheel found on Buddha’s footprint, created by the painter Ena de Silva.
First floor living room
First floor living room
It can be also said that around the house one often finds butterfly chairs designed for Knoll or inflatable chairs made in the late 1960s by Quasar-France together with statues of Buddha or Mercury. But, perhaps, the most emblematic example of bricolage is the living room on the first floor, with an entire wall covered with antique tapestries depicting mythical scenes from Indonesia; a décor that features Dutch colonial furniture on which one can find pieces of Scandinavian modernist glassware, some of them designed by the Finnish designer Oiva Toikka; butaque chairs designed by the Cuban-born designer Clara Porset for Luis Barragán; a tulip chair and some tables designed by Eero Saarinen for Knoll; a Thonet chair; a metal sculpture by artist Senanayake depicting the bo leaf, an important Buddhist symbol; finally, an example of Ray and Charles Eames ‘House of Cards’. It is clear, then, that, as much as the local realities are explicitly evident, the universal equally resides in this house, which has allowed the architect to live broadly, straddling cultures, geographies and even time. Architect and pedagogue Vladimir Belogolovsky, referring to Bawa’s work, wrote: ‘Rather than in complete buildings, his significance lies in fragments and notions. They exalt a multiplicity of ways of how to merge architecture and landscape, juxtapose modern and historical elements, blur inside and outside, frame seductively beautiful views, introduce traditional materials, reveal layers of history, and celebrate such notions as nostalgia and decay. His work is at once premodern, modern, and post-modern’.
In conclusion, Bawa has become a kind of guru in South Asia. In the context of a developing Sri Lanka, he established, with his designs, a new architectural prototype capable of reviving and redeeming the troubled history of the island. In 1985 he was awarded the title ‘Light of Science’ and in 1993 he was named ‘Pride of the Nation’. He was not lacking in international fame either. Contributing to this was Brian Brace Taylor’s book (1986), distributed in the USA by the MIT press, but also and above all the exhibition organized by the young British architect Christopher Beaver (1986) on Bawa’s work, which was held at the London headquarter of the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) in Portland Place, New York, Boston and Colombo. In 2001, the social commitment that has characterized his entire career was recognized by the individual awarding of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, that only three architects have received individually, and Bawa has so far been the last.
Lorenzo De Pascalis
BOCCONI STUDENTS ARTS SOCIETY 
Leave a comment