Here, There, and Only Somewhere: On Geoffrey Bawa’s Sense of Place
In a piece titled “House on a Red Cliff,” Sri Lankan–
born Canadian poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje
wrote of the subject’s sumptuous view:
the sea is in the leaves
the waves are in the plants
old languages in the arms
of the casuarina pine
[…]
where even in darkness
there is no horizon without a tree.
Melding the vegetal forms of nature with the ancient
imaginaries of the primordial sea, Ondaatje’s
sensuous description of the vista from the building
is almost certainly an ekphrastic reference to the
Jayewardene House (1997–98), a residence located
in the small southern seaside town Mirissa.
Designed by Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa (1919–2003) in the last phase of his life and practice, this penultimate project was commissioned by politician and family friend Pradeep Jayewardene, grandson of former Sri Lankan prime minister and president J. R. Jayewardene, who sought to replace the vacation home of the extended family that had burnt down a decade earlier during the 1989 insurrection led by the revolutionary Marxist– Leninist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party. Formerly a tea plantation, it occupied a dramatic site atop a promontory overlooking the Laccadive Sea that was central to the house’s final form—a partially sunken structure that gently rose into a ground-level jut where the living space is located. A subtle, almost delicate intervention into a landscape where Bawa once remarked “there should be no house,” the project—with an umbrella roof lightly supported by a series of columns roughly the same thickness as the trunks of the trees that surround the building—meticulously distills some of Bawa’s core principles of space and building: minimal interference with nature and an attentiveness to the specificity of place.
While generally reticent to discuss his practice, Bawa did express his thoughts on rare occasions toward the end of his life: “The site gives the most powerful push to a design, along with the brief. Without seeing the site I cannot work. It is essential to be there.” Minimal, clear, and direct, this quote gave the title to the retrospective of Bawa’s work that had its North American premiere last fall at the Yale Architecture Gallery. Organized by Shayari de Silva (BA ’11, MArch ’16), who heads the curatorial division of the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, the exhibition brought together a selection of documents, drawings, and photographs that relocated the archive within the architecture and animated an inquiry into not just what Bawa designed but how he designed. It was displayed first in Colombo and then traveled to the National Museum of Modern Art in New Delhi before opening in New Haven.
In some ways deeply entwined with the trajectory of Sri Lanka from 1948 onward, the spatial forms and ways of building illuminated in Geoffrey Bawa: It Is Essential to Be There are both emblematic and problematic of the postcolonial political economy, where sovereignty and statehood were negotiated and contested under the long, lingering shadows of empire. Within the narratives of postmodern architectural historiography, the gestures of decolonial nation-building have long been fertile substrate for the writing of a particular kind of built legacy. Almost monumental in its simplicity, the distillation of complex postindependence political economies of (re)construction into the singular corpus of an architect usually—or unusually —anointed by office bearers belies the grand heroism of mononymic attributions and myth-making. Among other reductive examples, India had Charles Correa, Cambodia had Vann Molyvann, and Sri Lanka, as history went, had Bawa.
Major exhibition projects such as MoMA’s 2022 blockbuster The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 have renewed (or, depending on precursive cosmopolitan familiarities, ignited) Western academic and cultural interests in the architectures of the Global South during the postcolonial interbellum moment. Yet the seductive reductionism of periodization necessitates a handful of tropes and terminologies that made a forest out of neighboring trees—critical regionalism and tropical modernism are just two such arboreal assemblages that appeared to serve as formalist descriptions in academic writing as much as shorthand terms for exotica in trade press. Herein lies the elegance of de Silva’s mediation: she returns to the object. Split across four thematic sections that each probe a dimension of Bawa’s method and logic, It Is Essential to Be There is contingent not on contextualizing theorization that occurred anterior to construction but on a grounded survey of things in places that respected the necessary specificity of time and space in each project’s conception and completion.
For example, in the section “Searching for a Way of Building,” projects such as the St. Thomas’ Preparatory School (1957–63), in Colombo—where the flat roof leaked during rainy days while its steel reinforcements corroded—served as important case studies or constructive failures. Bawa and his associates’ attempt to figure out how contemporary materials react to the tropical climate of Sri Lanka led to refinements in the architectonics of later projects, such as St. Bridget’s Montessori School (1963–64), featuring a monitor roof with a lifted central segment allowing hot air to escape, and the twelvestory State Mortgage Bank (1971–78), a rare high-rise project designed in a flat lozenge shape oriented to minimize solar gains, facilitating natural ventilation through a large, open interior space. This section compared and contrasted the evolution of projects across different iterations of drawings and plans while highlighting the collaborative nature of Bawa’s work with partners including batik artist Ena de Silva and structural engineer K. Poologasundram, with whom he developed personal friendships that would span the course of their lives.
The section “Situating a Practice” highlighted Bawa’s acumen for the site to serve as a principal catalyst of design through four key projects that span and react to the particularities of diverse local terrains. The urban Ena de Silva house (1960–62) refigured understandings of shelter and interiority through an inner courtyard that served as the heart of circulation without being partitioned from its environment. An updating of the nuclear logic of a traditional Sri Lankan house, it both celebrated and provided respite from the dense Colombo locale without being divorced from the exterior social space. The Polontalawa Estate Bungalow (1963– 67), much like the later Jayewardene House, embraced the material and spatial contexts of the land through the use of existing landscape features, such as large boulders nestled within the site, to constitute parts of the building form. Thus Bawa conscientiously rejected the colonial modality of tabula rasa development followed by enclosure with a built structure that dominates the land to posit a different possibility: building with the landscape so as to blur the boundaries between not just the inside and outside but also architecture and environment, dwelling and occupancy.
While modest in scale and ambition, the exhibition is exceptional in its selfassuredness and commitment to a rigorous internal logic that, much like Bawa’s approach to architecture, sought to articulate a nuanced reading and curation of what is already there. Never overstating the importance of a project, Bawa kept a careful eye trained on the complexity of building through a time of upheavals and the unraveling and weaving of social formations. Bawa’s taste, aspiration, and practice were constitutive of, and constituted by, the privilege of class and economy but also motivated by a deep, complex love for homeland. It was a passion that he continued to nurture through his life project, Lunuganga, the garden estate that he guarded with a fierce privacy. By returning to the basic processes of design as a material gesture that leaves behind variegating traces, It Is Essential to Be There navigated between archive, architect, and architecture to demonstrate the fact that the building of a work is no more and no less than the work of building—and why, if one desires to understand the entire meaning and scope of this relationship, it is essential to be there.
