In 1944, a young London-educated lawyer returned to his homeland, Sri Lanka— but Geoffrey Bawa’s heart was not in the legal practice. He, instead, after travelling worldwide and toying with the idea of buying a lakeside villa in Italy, found his anchor in Lunuganga in 1949, a year after Sri Lanka gained independence.
What was once a cinnamon estate under the Dutch and then a rubber plantation under the British, became Bawa’s home—a space of continuous experimentation that took over 50 years to arrive at its final shape. “Lunuganga was his studio-of-sorts. It was where he experimented and tested his ideas and technique before taking them to the world,” says the chief curator of the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, Shayari de Silva.
Inspired by the landscaped English gardens, Bawa spent years nurturing a frangipani tree in his estate, shaping each branch in order for it to grow the way he wanted. Today it holds pride in place in Lunuganga. Celebrating the 75th anniversary of Indo-Lanka diplomatic relations, the Ministry of Culture and the Sri Lankan High Commission mounted the first-ever Indian exhibition of Bawa’s practice at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA).
On till May 7, the exhibition, titled It is Essential to be There, centers on one of Asia’s most influential architects, the themes that concerned him, and his unique vision. It comprises his architectural drawings and photographs taken by him of the many sites. The title of the exhibition takes from Bawa’s own statement of how he felt it was needed to visit a raw landscape for the vision to come to him of how it would look after being built.
This exhibition was first presented in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from February-April 2022, before it travelled to Delhi. “Bawa executed quite a few commissions in India. For example, there is the 17-acre Heritage Madurai with its over 260-ft swimming pool designed on the lines of the Tirumala Temple tank, Tirupati. Then there is the Sarabhai House in Ahmedabad and a hotel in Goa,” Shayari, also the curator of the show, says. What started as a love affair with Lunuganga became an everlasting passion for Bawa, who again travelled to London to qualify as an architect in 1954.
“It is the allure of the open space that drives Bawa’s oeuvre. After his return in 1957, he realised the importance of going back to classical Sinhalese architecture and vernacular traditions. He wanted to build keeping nature as the central axis,” says Shayari. But this thought came to him only after a few failed early attempts where he tried to build like how he had been taught in London and during his study tours to Rome. Some of his early buildings—notably the classroom blocks for two Colombo schools—had flat roofs and half-open balconies. This was a disaster in a monsoonheavy country like Sri Lanka. It was a far cry from his later works like the Bentota Beach Hotel with its slanting angled roof that keeps the rain at bay and reminded one of the ancient Kandyan manor houses. This was when he started experimenting with verandahs, courtyards and overhanging roofs.
As glass was not readily available in Sri Lanka, he also began using locally produced materials such as clay tile, stone, and timber. “He developed his own contemporary language and broke down the barriers between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. He became a modern regionalist,” Shayari says of the architect, who during the Jayawardene government, built the new Parliament at Kotte in 1982. With the Heritance Kandalama Hotel, built in 1994 and one of his last big commissions, he gave full reign to his imagination. Built amid a tropical forest, he let the forest take over the building. “In fact, when Bawa visited the site shortly before his death, he wept. It was exactly how he had envisioned it to be when he started out—the forest had taken over. There was no demarcation between where the forest ended and where the building began,” she says.
It is Essential to be There. At NGMA, Delhi. Till May 7.