Geoffrey Bawa Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Geoffrey Bawa (1919-2003) was a Sri Lankan architect and the leading figure of tropical modernism. Combining modern planning with the courtyards, verandas and tiled roofs of Sri Lankan tradition, he designed houses, hotels and public buildings that open to the climate and the landscape, among them the Parliament of Sri Lanka at Kotte, the Kandalama Hotel set into a rock face, and his own garden estate at Lunuganga.

Colombo, Cambridge and Lunuganga

Bawa was born in Colombo in 1919 to a family of mixed European and Sri Lankan descent. He read English at Cambridge and studied law in London, and practised briefly as a lawyer in Colombo. In 1948 he bought a rubber estate at Lunuganga near Bentota, and the garden he made there over fifty years drew him towards architecture.

Architecture at thirty-eight

He studied at the Architectural Association in London and qualified in 1957, at the age of 38. Back in Colombo he joined the firm of Edwards, Reid and Begg, where he worked with the Danish architect Ulrik Plesner and the artist Laki Senanayake. His own town house at 33rd Lane, Number 11, grew from a row of small bungalows into a sequence of courtyards and rooms.

Hotels and the Parliament

From the 1960s Bawa built hotels that defined a Sri Lankan way of hospitality, including the Bentota Beach Hotel, the Kandalama Hotel at Dambulla (1994), covered in jungle, and the Lighthouse Hotel in Galle (1997). The new Parliament at Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte (1982) rises from an artificial lake as a group of copper-roofed pavilions.

Legacy

Bawa received the Chairman’s Award of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2001 and died in Colombo in 2003. Lunuganga and Number 11 are now run by the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, and his work continues to influence architects across South and Southeast Asia.