Serendib Serendipity: The Architecture of Geoffrey Bawa

Author(s): David Robson and Channa Daswatte

Source: AA Files, No. 35 (Spring 1998), pp. 26-41
Published by: Architectural Association School of Architecture
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Serendib Serendipity
The Architecture of Geoffrey Bawa

David Robson and Channa Daswatte

'Serendib': The ancient Arab name

to draw him back to Sri Lanka: both his

for Sri Lanka. 'Serendipity': A word

parents were dead, he had spent more

coined by Horace Walpole and

than a third of his life away from home

inspired by his tale 'The Three Princes

and, although only half European by

descent, he was almost wholly
European in outlook and had
developed a taste for beautiful country
houses, fine pictures and good
company. But the plan to buy the

of Serendip', whose heroes 'were

always making discoveries, by accidents
and sagacity, of things which they were
not in guest of.
This year marks both the fiftieth

anniversary of Sri Lanka's

independence and the fiftieth year of
Geoffrey Bawa's architectural Odyssey.
In 1948, as Ceylon was slipping
uneventfully out of the British Empire,

Bawa returned home after almost ten

years of exile and bought the derelict

rubber estate which was to kindle his
interest in landscape and architecture.
The two anniversaries are not entirely
unconnected: in making the transition
from restless traveller and reluctant

lawyer to builder and gardener Bawa

was setting out on the serendipitous
journey which would lead him to
become independent Sri Lanka's most
prolific and influential architect.

Bawa was born in 1919, the son of

a successful barrister, in what was then
the British colony of Ceylon, and grew
up in that tolerant, cultured and
cosmopolitan society which once
thrived on the verandas of Colombo's
leafy suburbs. In 1938 he came to
Britain and read English at Cambridge.
Later he turned to law and in 1943 was
called to the Bar in London. In 1945 he
returned to Ceylon and worked for a
time in a Colombo law firm. However,
after his mother's death in 1946 he

abandoned the legal profession and

set off on two years of travel which
took him through the Far East, across
the United States and eventually to

Europe. Finally at the end of 1947 he

came to a temporary halt in Italy and
was tempted to buy a farm overlooking

Lake Garda. There seemed to be little

Italian farm fell through and he

returned to Ceylon where, almost on
the rebound, he bought an estate at

Lunuganga near Bentota and set out to

transform it into a landscaped garden.
The garden project fired his
imagination but laid bare his lack of
technical knowledge. His growing
interest in building prompted a cousin
to suggest that he ought to train to
become an architect so that 'y?u can
do what you like doing best with other
people's money'. This advice seems
still to underscore his design
philosophy. Bawa designs each
building as if it were for himself: he

empathizes with his clients and is

reluctant to build for people with
whom he can't identify.
In 1951 he embarked on a trial
apprenticeship with H. H. Reid, the sole
surviving partner of the Colombo firm
of Edwards Reid and Begg. This British
colonial practice had been founded in
1923 by S. J. Edwards after he won the
competition to design Colombo's new
Town Hall, and remained the most
important in the region until the

outbreak of the Second World War.

After Reid's death Bawa returned to

Cambridge and in 1952 engaged a

tutor to teach him structural design.
In the following year he applied to

the Architectural Association and was

accepted directly into third year by

Michael Pattrick. This is said to have

been one of the most creative periods

in the AA's history, and the list of

Bawa's contemporaries reads today

like a Who's Who of architecture. Bawa

was the oldest student in the school at
the time and is remembered with
affection for his striking appearance,
his Rolls-Royce and his argumentative
exchanges with tutors. During Fourth
Year he studied under John Killick and

worked with Stuart Lewis and Tony

Matthes on a design for housing in
Holloway Road (Killick 1956). His final
year was spent largely in Rome
whence he would occasionally drive
at breakneck speed to put in a rare

appearance at Bedford Square. He

finally qualified in 1957 at the age of

38 and returned to Ceylon where,
almost immediately, he instated himself
as senior partner in what had become
by then the almost moribund practice
of Edwards Reid and Begg.
Bawa gathered around himself a
group of designers and artists from
many different backgrounds who,
inspired by a growing appreciation
of the depth and diversity of their own
culture and traditions, came together
to discover ways of making and doing
things which would be new and vital
and yet essentially Sri Lankan. As well
as his immediate office colleagues this
group included the artist Laki
Senanayake, the designer Barbara
Sansoni and the batik artist Ena de

Silva, all of whose work figures

prominently in buildings designed
by the practice.
In 1958 Bawa was joined by Ulrich
Plesner, a young Danish architect who
was to play an important role in the
development of the new practice
during its first decade. Plesner was
a charismatic character who brought
with him an appreciation of
Scandinavian design and detailing
tempered with an interest in Buddhism
and a curiosity about Sri Lanka's
building traditions. At the time the
architectural profession hardly existed

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and there was no school of

architecture. Bawa and Plesner figured
among the group who helped to found
the first school and they later helped a
number of their assistants to obtain
scholarships to study in England and
Denmark. Plesner quit the practice in
1965 to return to Europe, and Bawa
was joined by the engineer
Poologasundram with whom he was
to enjoy a fruitful relationship over the
next twenty years.

At the end of the 1950s the building

industry in Ceylon was still run along
traditional lines. Small general
contractors submitted tenders based

on rates and employed baasses, or

craftsmen, as sub-contractors.
Drawings were simple and graphic and
much of the detail was worked out on
the site or in the workshop with the

baass unahe, or 'most honourable

craftsman'. Invariably, the design
process would begin on the site: Bawa
has a remarkable facility for grasping
the key features of even the most
difficult terrain, and of envisioning
complex three-dimensional solutions.
On the building site he would sit and
stare at the emerging design and then

discuss detailed and often radical

changes with the baasses. In 1970 the

practice built Sri Lanka's first modern
resort hotel at Bentota from a basic

set of about twenty drawings, using

local builders and craftsmen, and
much of the detailed design occurred
on the site as the building.was taking
shape. Only twelve years later the new
Parliament buildings at Kotte were built
by an international contracting firm
and needed more than three thousand

drawings.
During the 1960s imported building
materials other than basic steel
sections and cement were difficult
to obtain. Modern fixtures and fittings
simply didn't exist and it was

necessary to work closely with the

baasses in order to produce home?
made substitutes. All of this led to a
spirit of experimentation and
improvisation, and a growing interest
in the possibilities offered by traditional
methods of construction and

craftsmanship.
Over a period of thirty years Bawa's
practice established itself as the most
respected and most prolific in Sri
Lanka, with a portfolio of work which
included religious, social, cultural,

educational, governmental, commercial

and residential buildings, and in each

of these areas he succeeded in

establishing a whole canon of Sri

Lankan prototypes. Finally, at the end of

the 1980s when he and Poologasundram

agreed to dissolve their partnership, it
was widely assumed that Bawa would
retire to Lunuganga and contemplate
his garden. Nothing, however, could
have been further from the truth. The
closing of the office signalled a new
period of creativity and during the past
ten years he has worked from his
Colombo home with a small group of
young architects to produce a steady
stream of fresh designs.
Two projects hold the key to an
understanding of Bawa's work: the
garden at Lunuganga which he has

Geoffrey Bawa (left) on the site of the

de Silva House, 1960 (seep. 30).

continued to fashion for almost fifty

years and his own house in Colombo.

Both have been many years in the
making, both have served as test beds
for ideas, both take an existing context
as their starting-point. The town house
is a haven of peace locked away within
a busy and increasingly hostile city, an
infinite garden of the mind constructed
on a tiny urban plot. Lunuganga, in
contrast, is a distant retreat, an outpost
on the edge of the known world, which
challenges the infinite horizon of the
ocean to the west and the endless
switchback of hills to the east,

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Geoffrey Bawa

reducing a vast open landscape to

a controlled series of outdoor rooms,
a civilized garden within the larger
garden wilderness of Sri Lanka.
The work Bawa carried out under the
aegis of Edwards Reid and Begg has
been well documented and his major
projects such as the Bentota Beach
Hotel (Brawne 1978), the Triton Hotel
(Scott 1983), Sri Lanka's new Parliament
(Scott 1983) and the Ruhuna University

campus (Brawne 1986) will already be

familiar to many readers. Critics have
portrayed Bawa variously as a tropical
modernist, as a romantic, as a
vernacularist and as a regionalist. This
failure to look beyond simple labels has

been made worse by Bawa's own

mistrust of theory and his extreme

reluctance to discuss his methods or his

influences. He has written: 'When one

delights as much as I do in planning a

building and having it built, I find it

impossible to describe the exact steps in

an analytical or dogmatic way. ... I have
a very strong conviction that it is
impossible to explain architecture in

words - I have always enjoyed seeing

buildings but seldom enjoyed reading

BSE..

explanations about them - as I feel, with

others, that architecture cannot be totally

explained but must be experienced.'

(Brace-Taylor 1986) He is unimpressed
by form-making for its own sake:
buildings inherit meanings from their

milieu and acquire meanings through

use. A building grows from an
appreciation of the site and an
understanding of the aspirations of the
client: the rest is movement, spatial
manipulation, the framing of views, the

choice and disposition of materials, and

the play of light.
Entrance steps of Geoffrey Bawa's garden at Lunuganga (above), and carport entrance of his
own house in Colombo (below).

It is difficult to pin down Bawa's

influences. He himself mentions

English country houses and their

landscaped gardens, the Alhambra in
Granada, the forts of Rajasthan, the

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Keralan palace of Padmanabapuram,

and the buildings of Cambridge and
Rome. He also acknowledges his debt
to classical Sinhalese architecture and
to the later vernacular traditions which
evolved from the fusion of medieval
architecture with the architecture of the

Portuguese, Dutch and British

colonists. Inspired perhaps by the
writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy
(1908) and Andrew Boyd (1947) he and
a small group of friends were amongst
the first to look seriously at Ceylon's
architectural heritage and to treat it as a

Bawa has exerted a defining influence Eirace-Taylor, Brian, Geoffrey Bawa

on the emerging architecture of the

(London: Thames & Hudson, 1995)

newly independent Sri Lanka and on Eirawne, Michael, 'The Work of Geoffrey

Bawa', Architectural Review, April 1978

successive generations of young Sri
Lankan architects. In this way his ideas E Irawne, Michael, 'The University of Ruhuna',
have spread out across the island like
Architectural Review, April 1986
ripples on a pond and have provided a
Irawne, Michael, 'Paradise Found',

bridge between the past and the future,

a mirror in which ordinary people have

been able to obtain a clearer image of

their own emerging culture.

Bawa's architecture is a subtle blend

of modern and traditional, of East and
West, of formal and picturesque: he

Architectural Review, December 1995

^oomaraswamy, Ananda, Medieval Sinhalese

Art (London: Essex House Press, 1908)

ayawardene, Shanthee, 'Bawa - A

Contribution to Cultural Regeneration',
M/'mar 19, January-March 1986a

ayawardene, Shanthee, 'Jewel of the

Orient', Building Design, March 1986b

possible source for a new architecture.

But Bawa was also influenced by the
twin heroes of the Modern Movement,
Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier,
elements of whose work can be found

exploits the climate and fertility of his

native land in order to break down the

outside, of building and landscape; he

1987-1995 (Brisbane: RAIA, 1996)

fused into what seem at first sight to be

his most traditional pieces. While most

country's colourful history to create an

Architects (Cologne: Taschen, 1995)

artificial segregation of inside and *Weniger, Michael, Bawa: Recent Projects

draws on every twist and turn of his \Chan, Hassan-Udin, Contemporary Asian

commentators have tended to overlook

architecture which is fitting to its place, ^(illick, John, 'The Disappearing Village',
but he has also scoured the world for
Architectural Design, October 1956

his more overtly modern designs,

preferring to dwell on the vernacular
side of his work, it is possible to show
that most of his buildings actually
include both traditional and

architecture which is of its age.

To illustrate the range of Bawa's work
we have selected three key buildings,
one from each of the first three decades

contemporary forms in an often

surprising but wholly appropriate way.
It is particularly important to place
Bawa in a context: not a historic
context but rather the context of

contemporary Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka's

population has almost tripled since
independence, while its communities
have been fractured by bitter political

and ethnic disputes. In today's Sri

Lanka, Toyota cars vie with bullock
carts on the country's narrow roads,
young girls in saris operate complex
machines in factories making jeans for
Marks and Spencer, and farmers
gather in the evening under the village
tree to watch the latest American soap
on rupavaheeni, the 'picture from
heaven'. Although it might be thought
that his buildings have had no direct
impact on the lives of ordinary people,

AA

ideas with which to inform an

of his working career, and three

buildings from the fourth and most
recent decade. We have tried to avoid
buildings that are already well known,
and for this reason have omitted larger
projects such as the University of
Ruhuna and the new Parliament.

.aird, Simon, 'Geoffrey Bawa and the

Architecture of Sri Lanka', Mac II: Mackintosh

School of Architecture Journal, 1984

.al, Ashok, 'The Architecture of Geoffrey

Bawa', Architecture and Design, vol. vii,
no. 2, March/April 1990

.ewcock, Ronald, 'Bawa - Arcadia in Sri

Lanka', RIBA Journal, February 1986
\lakamura, Toshio, 'The Architecture of
Geoffrey Bawa', Architecture & Urbanism,

no. 141, June 1982

3owell, Robert, 'Geoffrey Bawa', Singapore

Institute of Architects Journal, no. 143,

July/August 1987

Bibliography

Architectural Review, 'Ceylon Pavilion at I

3owell, Robert, The Tropical Asian House

Bawa, Geoffrey, Christoph Bon, and Dominic

Richards, J. M., 'Ceylon - Seven New

Bawa, Geoffrey, and Ulrich Plesner, 'Work in

Ceylon', Architekten, nos. 16 & 17, 1965

Richards, Sir James, 'Geoffrey Bawa',

Boyd, Andrew, A People's Tradition', Marg,

vol. i, no. 2 (January 1947)

Robson, David, 'Lunuganga: The Story of

a Garden', Mimar 40, September 1991

Brace-Taylor, Brian, Geoffrey Bawa

Scott, Rupert, 'Two Bawa', Architectural

Expo 70', August 1970

Sansoni, Lunuganga (Singapore: Times

Editions, 1990)

(Singapore: Concept Media, 1986)

FILES

35

(Singapore: Select Books, 1996)

Buildings', Architectural Review,

February 1966

Mimar19, January/March 1986

Review, May 1983

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Geoffrey Bawa

House for Dr A. S. H. de Silva

Galle, 1960
This house for a doctor was built in

1960 on a sloping suburban site in the

southern town of Galle. With hindsight

it can be recognized as part of an

evolving series of designs which
began in 1958 with the Deraniyagala
House in Colombo. Bawa seems to
have gone through a process of
deconstructing the colonial bungalow
and reconstituting its parts in an
apparently informal way to create a

chequerboard system of linked

pavilions which trap between them
small gardens and courts. In Galle

the separated elements are still

unfettered by a defined boundary
but are linked on the steeply sloping
site by a single roof plane and by a
long raking spine wall.
At the foot of the slope is the
doctor's consulting room with an open
loggia which was intended to be the
patients' waiting room. This is linked to
the main house by a long staircase
tunnel which serves also as the

boundary to the garden and as a

pointer to the house's principal private
entrance. The main house appears on
plan to be a simple rectangle arranged
around a central courtyard, though the

section articulates the upper bedroom

wing from the lower living area. A
separate wing runs southwards from
the living area along contours between
two parallel walls and contains the
kitchens, kitchen courts and servants'
rooms, while a linked pavilion to the
north contains an independent flat for
the doctor's sister. Although there are
enclosed and half-enclosed garden
courts the house remains relatively
extrovert and the gardens appear to
reach out towards the surrounding
landscape. The articulation of the plan
elements and their disposition on the
slope in relation to open courtyards

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^^^^^^^^^^

^^^^^^^^^^fl^^^^^^^H|^Eflj^^^^^^^^Hl^^D^|^^^^^^^^^^^| opposite entrance

and gardens makes good

environmental sense: every room

benefits from cross-ventilation or from

a stack effect through the courtyards

which is induced by convection from
the roof.

The plan has been compared to Mies

van der Rohe's 1923 project for a
country house, and there are certainly
many similarities: both attempt to blow
apart the traditional villa, both make a

clear distinction between 'wall' and 'no

wall', and both use continuing wall

planes to link inside and outside space
and to define outdoor rooms. But Bawa

exploits the sloping site to create

additional spatial effects, and uses the

roof plane to unify the elements and
anchor them to the site. He also

which offered a new model for the

replaces the solid hearth core with a

oblique references to traditional forms

it established a new relationship

void: here for the first time he places

an open courtyard at the very heart of
the plan. Whilst he has arrived at a

urban house in a tropical city. Although

it used traditional materials and made

between inside and outside space and

addressed issues of climate and

solution which can be compared to the

comfort in a wholly pragmatic way. Two

courtyard or med a midula of a

years later Bawa's explorations were to

culminate in the Osmund de Silva

has come to it on a fairly long and

circuitous route. In typical fashion he
takes one idea and adds to it several

House (Richards 1966, Brace-Taylor

1986). There the same elements were
reassembled in a more formal way
within an enclosing wall on a confined
Colombo site, and the primacy of the
central courtyard was fully established.

traditional Sinhalese manor house he

others in order to create something

which is quite new.
Here was a revolutionary design

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Geoffrey Bawa

left to right: Elevation and site plan, view out through

breathing wall (1997), and side view (1997).

Offices for the Steel Corporation

Oruwela, 1968

right angles to the main rolling mill and

to build it out into the reservoir. The

During the 1960s the Sri Lankan

government attempted to pursue a
policy of non-alignment and signed 'aid
and trade' agreements with countries
of the Eastern Bloc. The steel-rolling
mills at Oruwela were built with Soviet

building adopts a simple rectangular

form but has an outward cantilevering
section. This section, inspired by temple
buildings in Kerala and Nepal, had
been used by Bawa with great effect in
the design of a classroom block for
Colombo Ladies College two years
previously and was to make a stunning
reappearance in the Bentota Beach
Hotel of 1970 (Brawne 1978, Brace
Taylor 1986). Its obvious practical
advantages are that it offers protection
from overhead sun and monsoon rain,
and permits the use of a breathing wall.
The main structure is of framed
reinforced concrete, and the external
breathing wall is formed from pre-cast
rectangular grilles of concrete which

aid, their main function being to convert

imported steel billet into reinforcing

rod. The site is lost in an area of

rubber and coconut plantations about

twelve miles to the east of Colombo,

and it comes as a surprise when

driving along country lanes suddenly to
encounter the massive bulk of a rolling
mill towering above coconut trees.
The mills require water for cooling,
and a large reservoir was established
on the site. Bawa was entrusted with
the design of the administrative

diminish in scale from floor to floor. The

building and decided to place it at

original design proposed open-plan

Offices in order to maximize natural

ventilation and lighting. Today the steel

mills are in private ownership and the
administrative building is in fairly good
condition, though the floors of the
open-plan offices have been totally

subdivided.

Bawa was also responsible for the

design of a guest house and a housing
scheme for factory workers. The
housing consists of rows of back-to
back courtyard houses built along the
contours in a neighbouring rubber

estate. Each house occupies a

rectangular plot of about 150 square

metres, and the main habitable rooms
open on to a walled courtyard. This
simple plan achieved a notional density
of about fifty dwellings per hectare and
offered an interesting prototype for

inexpensive medium-density urban

housing.

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Geoffrey Bawa

State Mortgage Bank

Hyde Park, Colombo, 1978
This uncharacteristic twelve-storey
office building was commissioned by
the socialist coalition government of
Mrs Bandaranayake to house the State
Mortgage Bank. However, it was
completed after J. R. Jayawardene's
1977 election victory and subsequently
became the main secretariat of the
Mahaveli Development Ministry.
Surprisingly it has never been

published and was even omitted from

Brian Brace-Taylor's monograph of
1986, probably because its
uncompromisingly geometric form did
not accord with that book's emphasis
on the vernacular and picturesque
aspects of Bawa's work. This fact did
not prevent Ken Yeang form observing
that '[Bawa's] Mahaveli Headquarters
Building is probably the best example
of a bioclimatically-responsive tall
building to be found anywhere in the
world* (Keniger 1996).

The restricted site is wedged between

Colombo's Hyde Park Corner and the
southern tip of Beira Lake. This

immediate urban infrastructure. The

main elevations face north and south in

a residential suburb, and the vestiges of

Bawa's childhood home can still be
seen on the other side of the road. The

from deep-spandrel panels which are

designed as air-intake louvres.
Although the office floors were
intended to be open, they were
partitioned off by the second client,
whose expatriate consultants and
upper managers all demanded to be
air-conditioned. Some initial problems
were experienced in monsoon
conditions, but there is little doubt
that these could have been solved by
sympathetic building management.
Sadly the building was never treated as
a prototype and no attempt was made
by the client to monitor its performance
or to modify its details. In the rest of
Colombo the demands of off-shore

commercial district was in former times

lozenge-shaped plan results in a profile

which changes dramatically according
to viewpoint and is capped by a floating
concrete canopy which reveals the
geometric logic of the concrete structure
below. The tower offers a slender profile
towards the junction and a much flatter
one towards the park and the lake.

This design appeared just as

Colombo was about to experience an

unprecedented building boom in its
central business district and offered a
potent prototype for office building in

a tropical city. The aim was to provide

a working environment which could be
lit and ventilated by natural means, in
a building of moderate height which
did not impose undue strain on the

order to reduce solar gain and to catch

the main breezes. Windows are set back

property developers and international

clients prevailed, and a crop of sealed
glass, energy-guzzling towers sprang
up around the main business district.

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Geoffrey Bawa

Kandalama Hotel
Dambulla, 1994

to the main reception areas.

Bawa's use of a flat roof and a

In 1990 Bawa was commissioned by

the Aitken Spence Group to design a
hotel in Sri Lanka's Dry Zone which
would serve visitors to King Kasyapa's
rock citadel at Sigiriya and the cave
temples of Dambulla. Having been
given a relatively free hand, he chose
a site beside the ancient Kandalama

starkly expressed concrete frame has

surprised a number of commentators,
but both are ideally suited to the
location. More importantly, this
apparent departure from his more
familiar modes helps to turn
Kandalama into a unique experience:
this is no beach hotel on a monsoon

Tank at a point where a boulder-strewn shore. And yet the building grows out
ridge advances on to its southern
of its site in a manner which is wholly
shore. The project encountered some
consistent with earlier projects such as
opposition from the Buddhist clergy,
the Polontalawa Estate Bungalow of
1965 or the Ruhuna campus of 1984
and the design underwent several
changes. In its final form the 160
(Brawne 1986). The buildings either
bedroom hotel is wrapped around two
hug the site, even burrowing into it, or
opposite faces of the ridge, with one
they stand proud and allow the rocky
wing facing towards Sigiriya, which lies landscape to run under them. The
ten miles away to the north, and the
concrete frame is used to support a
second skin of timber sun-breakers
other wing facing west with views
northwards towards Dambulla and the
which in turn support a screen of
Matale Hills. The two wings are
vegetation, while the flat roof has been
connected by a rock-faced corridor
turned into a tropical garden. The
which runs from the hotel entrance
tectonic form makes it possible for the

hotel to hug the shape of the ridge,

so that the journey to a room runs
alongside an overhanging cliff-face,
preparing the tourist for his ascent of
the Sigiriya rock.

The materials used in the public

spaces are cool and hard, and work
with the large expanses of naked rock
to convey a wholly appropriate feeling
of austerity: one might almost be
inside an evocation of King Kasyapa's
palace. The rooms seem small in relation
to the generous corridors and are
conceived of as cells which look out
across the tank towards the horizon.

A second hotel has since appeared

on the tank's northern shore: its orange
Kandyan-tiled roofs scream out from
the dry zone scrub. In contrast, when
one looks back across the tank
towards Bawa's Kandalama, almost
nothing is visible: the grey-black
tectonic forms melt into the ridge from
which they have sprung.

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1. The ridge
2. Entry ramp

3. Entrance'cave'

4. Reception hall

5. Lower pool

6. Administration

7. SigiriyaWing
8. DambuiiaWing
9. Overhanging cliff

left to right: View over the lower swimming pool towards the Kandalama Tank,
drawing of ground-floor plan by Channa Daswatte, fagade detail, and sitting room

off main corridor.

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Geoffrey Bawa

LU

The Lighthouse Hotel

Galle, 1996

to a vertical drum within which the p

main stair spirals upwards towards the

The Lighthouse Hotel carries

something of the spirit of Kandalama
back to the edge of the ocean. The site
is a rocky promontory, once occupied
by a magistrates' circuit bungalow,

principal lounge level and the upper r

restaurant level. The staircase itself p

which sits tightly between the main

road and the sea about a mile from the

warriors re-enacting their encounter at c

charming old Dutch seaport of Galle.

Here the sea is inhospitable - huge
breakers roll in incessantly from the
Indian Ocean - but the views are
stunning. The main entrance and
reception buildings hug the southern
tip of the ridge and offer views towards
the Galle Fort. The lower slopes of the
rock are encased in rubble retaining
walls, which house the main entrance
and service points. The first floor is
finished in samara-coloured render and
the upper floor is recessed behind a
delicate colonnade. A massive porte
cochere leads past the reception desk

has been designed by Bawa's old friend <

Laki Senanayake and is conceived as a c

swirling mass of Dutch and Sinhalese t

Randeniya in 1630. The lounges and c

restaurants carry memories of old rest- r

houses and planters' clubs while the t

furnishing of the terraces and t
verandas is solid and rugged to
withstand the buffetings of the (

Southwest Monsoon. The first three- \

storey range of hotel rooms hugs the (
edge of the shore and runs northwards (

from the main reception areas. At the (

back of the site a parallel service block <

encloses a long courtyard of clipped I

grass punctuated by outcrops of bare t
rock. The second range of hotel rooms i
steps back towards the road to create 1
an open area with lawns and bars and i

>ool between it and the ocean.

The strategy is both to confront the
elentless crashing of the waves and to
>rovide contrasting areas of shelter
md tranquillity. No single space is self
iontained or complete: each is in part

he consequence of a previous space

md the anticipation of a subsequent

>ne; each retains links with its

leighbours and with the outside so that

he eye is continually invited to explore
he possibilities the building offers.
The hotel was built by Herbert

hooray, a successful developer and

lotelier who had previously worked as
>ne of Bawa's contractors. The
designs were produced by Bawa and
^hanna Daswatte with a small group of
assistants working from Bawa's home.
Detailed execution was entrusted to
he developer, though Bawa was
etained as design consultant
hroughout the project and made
egular visits to the site.

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Geoffrey Bawa

Jayawardene House
Red Cliffs, Mirissa, 1997

platoon of black columns and that a

thin horizontal roof is floating amongst
their fronds. A simple pleasure-pavilion

The Jayawardene family invited Bawa

to design a replacement for an old
coconut estate bungalow perched high
on the red cliffs which frame the

stands on a stepped plinth facing

towards the place of the setting sun.
The roof is a galvanized steel deck
which slopes gently southwards and
is supported on three rows of six
concrete-encased columns: there are
no walls, no doors, no windows, no
shutters. The raised section of plinth is

eastern side of Weligama Bay. The site

lies at the end of a steep track which
heads off from a nondescript gateway
beside the main Galle-to-Matara road.
After a short climb the noise of the
traffic is left far behind and a final twist

in the track reveals on the right side a

breathtaking view westwards across

bay and in front a grove of coconut

palms, silhouetted against the southern

sky. Closer inspection reveals that the
coconut trunks are harbouring a

The house is conceived by Bawa as a

minimalist intervention which colonizes

the sweeping landscape through the

simple expedient of inserting into it a
grid of columns and a single line of
roof as a gesture by the hand of man.
Although the Jayawardene House is
separated in time from the A. S. H. de
Silva House by almost forty years, they
are two points on the same journey.
Both consist essentially of a roof which

a place for sitting, while the main floor

hugs a landscape and excludes sun

is occupied by a huge dining table. An

enclosed stairway leads down under
the raised section of the plinth to a
half-buried area containing service
areas and bedrooms which

and rain while admitting cooling

currents of air. It may be that one is

communicate with lower courtyards.

simply a distillation of the other, or that

it takes forty years to gain the

confidence to strip things down to

their bare essentials.

Geoffrey Bawa setting out the approach in September 1997 (the house is in amongst the trees), and corner detail.

40

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35

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