Renowned architect Bawa is no more  

[May 28, 2003 - 9.00 GMT] 

Well-known Sri Lankan Geoffrey Bawa died yesterday at the age of 84. Bawa was an architect of great repute whose work had a tremendous impact throughout Asia. He was accepted as an eminent scholar worldwide.

Bawa has been described by his biographer, Brian Brace Taylor as “highly personal in his approach, evoking the pleasures of the senses that go hand in hand with the climate, landscape, and culture of ancient Ceylon, Bawa brings together an appreciation of the Western humanist tradition in architecture with needs and lifestyles of his own country”.

Geoffrey Bawa made a late entry into the field of architecture at the age of 38. He was already a practicing lawyer. He read English in Cambridge, before studying law in London, where he was called to the Bar in 1944.

Some of the best-known buildings in this country built in the past 25 or more years are acclaimed as masterpieces. The intense devotion he brings to composing his architecture in an intimate relationship with nature, is evidenced by his attention to landscape and vegetation and the crucial settings for his architecture. His sensitivity to environment is reflected in his careful attention to the sequencing of space, the creation of vistas, court-yards, and walkways, the use of materials and treatment of details.

Bawa was born in 1919 in what was then the British colony of Ceylon. His father was a wealthy and successful lawyer, of Muslim and English parentage, while his mother was of mixed German, Scottish and Sinhalese descent. After World War II he joined a Colombo law firm, but he soon tired of the legal profession and in 1946 set off on two years of travel that took him through the Far East, across the United States and finally to Europe.

Bawa qualified as an architect in 1957 at the age of thirty-eight and returned to Ceylon. His growing prestige was recognized in 1979, when he was invited by President J R Jayewardene to design Sri Lanka's new Parliament at Kotte,8 kilometers east of the Capital.

At Bawa's suggestion the swampy site was dredged to create an island at the centre of a vast artificial lake, with the Parliament building appearing as an asymmetric composition of copper roofs floating above a series of terraces rising out of the water. Abstract references to traditional Sri Lankan and South Indian architecture were incorporated within a Modernist framework to create a powerful image of democracy, cultural harmony, continuity and progress and a sense of gentle monumentality.

He also designed the award winning Kandalama hotel, the Bentota Beach, Blue Waters hotel and Lighthouse among scores of other well-known places in Sri Lanka.

In 1998 Bawa was tragically struck down by a massive stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to speak. Although it might be thought that his buildings have had no direct impact on the lives of ordinary people, Bawa has exerted a defining influence on the emerging architecture of independent Sri Lanka and on successive generations of younger architects. His ideas have spread across the island, providing a bridge between the past and the future, a mirror in which ordinary people can obtain a clearer image of their own evolving culture.

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Last Updated Date: May 28, 2003  - 9 .00 GMT.