m̌ ḫ's photos with the keyword: Geoffrey Bawa

Geoffrey Manning Bawa (23 July 1919 – 27 May 2003) was a Sri Lankan architect. He is the most renowned architect in Sri Lanka and was among the most influential Asian architects of his generation. He is the principal force behind what is today known globally as "Tropical Modernism". He was born half British, and being orphaned at a very early age. He got his Law degree from London and came back to Sri Lanka to work as a lawyer, following the Bawa family tradition. He soon grew weary of being a lawyer and went on a vacation to Italy where he was utterly captivated by the Italian gardens and had to resist buying an Italian lake house. This is where tropical, Mediterranean architecture and landscaping got stuck in his head. He came back to Sri Lanka and bought a rubber plantation in the Bentota area in 1948, to make his own garden home. However, finding that he lacked in skills and technicalities, he left for London to study as an architect. In 1957, he was a qualified architect and back home. He began planning and designing his Lunuganga country home. He took serious inspiration from Italian renaissance gardens and gave it a subtle modern twist. Geoffrey and his brother Bevis were part of a milieu of sophisticated homosexuals who were drawn to the idea of Ceylon as a place of beauty, sensuality and escape. Bawa's architecture is at one with the land: inside and outside blend seamlessly, and it is designed for the maximum pleasure of its inhabitants. He was influenced by colonial and traditional Ceylonese architecture, and the role of water in it, but rejected both the idea of regionalism and the imposition of preconceived forms onto a site. Bawa became an Associate of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects in 1960. An ensuing close association with a coterie of like-minded artists and designers, including Ena de Silva, Barbara Sansoni and Laki Senanayake, produced a new awareness of indigenous materials and crafts, leading to a post-colonial renaissance of culture.

www.geoffreybawa.com/lunuganga-country-estate/virtual-garden-tour

No place reveals the soul of Geoffrey Bawa, the acclaimed Sri Lankan architect, better than his country home, Lunuganga. When Bawa purchased the site in 1948, it was nothing more than a derelict rubber estate sitting on a promontory in the Dedduwa Lake, 2km inland from the Bentota coast. But over the next fifty years, he painstakingly transformed it into one of the most seductive, passionate pleasure gardens of the twentieth century. From the heart of the estate, turn to the south, and a wide swathe of green field, fringed by thickets, swells gently upwards to Cinnamon Hill. Beyond, the lake glimmers and draws the eye to the hills in the distance. Turn to the north, and a glorious azure sweep of water and sky swings into view. Here, the edge of the land falls away in a dramatic cliff to reveal a water garden filled with lilies and ornamental rice paddies. This is the complex, Arcadian magic of Lunuganga: a single turn transforms an enthralling, idyllic perspective into an ecstatic, unrestrained panorama. To wander through Lunuganga is to be confronted with a palimpsest of influences, ideas, and memories.

Club Villa, located in the heart of Bentota, one of the most sought after destinations in Sri Lanka is known for its distinctive offerings. Designed by Geoffrey Bawa, a world-renowned name in creating simple yet elegant living styles, this property creates the ideal home-away from home stays. From the architecture design to the services, the team Club Villa only pursue to offer the best experience of warm hospitality that Sri Lankans are famed for. www.clubvillabentota.com

www.clubvillabentota.com/pages/excursions.html

Elements of Italian Renaissance gardens, English landscaping, Japanese garden art, & the water gardens of ancient Sri Lanka are all blended classical Greco-Roman statues pose insouciantly, and bacchanalian grotesque sculptures glare from tangles of undergrowth. Precise, orthogonal lines give way unexpectedly to baroque, serpentine contours. Engulfing everything is foliage of a deep, intoxicating green, broken occasionally by the hues and textures of wrought iron, stone, concrete, and clay. In the midst of Bawa’s personal, tropical Eden, all senses are heightened: to the views of the garden and the lake dappled by light and shade, to the sounds of birds and the rustling of leaves, and to the smell of the wet earth and grass after rain. Lunuganga is an experience of almost overwhelming aesthetic pleasure, and remains Bawa’s most extravagant creation and testament. The entire estate has been preserved as Bawa left it at the moment of his death, and is now run as a country house boutique hotel offering an unparalleled opportunity to experience the architect’s vision as he intended: by inhabiting it.

No place reveals the soul of Geoffrey Bawa, the acclaimed Sri Lankan architect, better than his country home, Lunuganga. When Bawa purchased the site in 1948, it was nothing more than a derelict rubber estate sitting on a promontory in the Dedduwa Lake, 2km inland from the Bentota coast. But over the next fifty years, he painstakingly transformed it into one of the most seductive, passionate pleasure gardens of the twentieth century. From the heart of the estate, turn to the south, and a wide swathe of green field, fringed by thickets, swells gently upwards to Cinnamon Hill. Beyond, the lake glimmers and draws the eye to the hills in the distance. Turn to the north, and a glorious azure sweep of water and sky swings into view. Here, the edge of the land falls away in a dramatic cliff to reveal a water garden filled with lilies and ornamental rice paddies. This is the complex, Arcadian magic of Lunuganga: a single turn transforms an enthralling, idyllic perspective into an ecstatic, unrestrained panorama. To wander through Lunuganga is to be confronted with a palimpsest of influences, ideas, and memories.

www.clubvillabentota.com/pages/excursions.html

The Sri Lankan Architect Geoffrey Bawa is now regarded as having been one of the most important and influential Asian architects of the 20th century. Bawa came to architecture late, only qualifying at the age of thirty-eight in 1957, but he soon established himself as Sri Lanka’s most prolific and inventive architect, establishing a whole canon of prototypes for buildings in a post-independence context. His oeuvre includes hotels, houses, schools and universities, factories, offices, numerous public buildings as well as the new Sri Lankan Parliament. Bawa’s work is characterized by sensitivity to site and context. His work is instinctively, rather than self-consciously, sustainable. His designs break the barriers between inside and outside, between buildings and landscape, and he characteristically links a complex series of spaces—rooms, courtyards, loggias, verandah—with distant vistas in a single scenographic composition. One of Bawa’s most impressive achievements has been the Garden at Lunuganga, which he has slowly fashioned for himself from an abandoned rubber estate over a period of fifty years. The result is a series of outdoor rooms conceived with an exquisite sense of theatre as a civilized wilderness set within the greater garden of Sri Lanka. He died in 2003 and was cremated on the Cinnamon Hill of his magical garden. In 2001 Bawa received the special Chairman’s award in the eighth cycle of the Aga Khan award for architecture, becoming only the third architect to be so honored since the awards inception.

archnet.org/sites/4153

In 1961 the nuns of the Good Shepherd commissioned a new chapel for their convent in Bandarawela. This small market town was situated at 1300 metres above sea level in an area renowned for its pleasant, dry climate and the convent was used as a training centre and a rest home. The original concept was developed by Plesner and Bawa with their friend Barbara Sansoni and the detailed design was then worked up by Laki Senanayake under Plesner's direction. Early sketch drawings by Plesner survive as well as Senanayake's final working drawings. Lying beyond a group of older convent buildings, the chapel occupies a ridge that falls gently towards the east with steep slopes to the north and south. Its street façade takes the form of a long blank wall of grey rubble terminating in a squat square tower and is relieved by a series of five low recessed bays formed just above ground level by bearing arches. These serve to admit a trickle of ventilation along the inside wall of the chapel and are decorated with panels of patterned terracotta tiles. A small door in the façade - the public entrance to the chapel - opens into a wide vestibule connecting at its opposite end with the more private areas of the convent, and through two doors to the right into the chapel itself. The chapel's granite floor follows the slope of the ground and falls gently away towards the altar, placed at the base of the tower and lit from an unseen glass roof. The roof of the chapel itself is made up of five angled vaults of red tuna wood. On the south wall of grey rubble stone abutting the road a series of terracotta reliefs depicts the Stations of the Cross, while the north wall carries four full bays of glazing incorporating three large crucifixes at their junctions and opening towards a thickly planted garden with views of distant hills. At night, spotlights illuminate the altar from the tower, while the body of the church is lit indirectly from the garden. Inspired by Donald Friend, Barbara Sansoni produced the terracotta Rising Christ that graces the solid bay in the north wall as well as the Stations of the Cross and the patterned tiles that line the bearing arches. The chapel is one of the most impressive spaces for Christian worship to be found in Sri Lanka. The overall effect is one of focused calm and sanctity achieved through careful manipulation of space, juxtaposition of simple materials, and the careful control of light and shade. While it makes oblique references to the Romanesque ­ Gothic traditions of Western church building, the chapel has no direct precedents. It was built almost entirely from materials found nearby or manufactured in the vicinity, and seems to grow out of the ground, a building that has been “unearthed” rather than designed. Source: Robson, David. 2002. Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works. London: Thames & Hudson, p. 176-177.

archnet.org/sites/4153

Geoffrey Manning Bawa (23 July 1919 – 27 May 2003) was a Sri Lankan architect. He is the most renowned architect in Sri Lanka and was among the most influential Asian architects of his generation. He is the principal force behind what is today known globally as "Tropical Modernism". He was born half British, and being orphaned at a very early age. He got his Law degree from London and came back to Sri Lanka to work as a lawyer, following the Bawa family tradition. He soon grew weary of being a lawyer and went on a vacation to Italy where he was utterly captivated by the Italian gardens and had to resist buying an Italian lake house. This is where tropical, Mediterranean architecture and landscaping got stuck in his head. He came back to Sri Lanka and bought a rubber plantation in the Bentota area in 1948, to make his own garden home. However, finding that he lacked in skills and technicalities, he left for London to study as an architect. In 1957, he was a qualified architect and back home. He began planning and designing his Lunuganga country home. He took serious inspiration from Italian renaissance gardens and gave it a subtle modern twist. Geoffrey and his brother Bevis were part of a milieu of sophisticated homosexuals who were drawn to the idea of Ceylon as a place of beauty, sensuality and escape. Bawa's architecture is at one with the land: inside and outside blend seamlessly, and it is designed for the maximum pleasure of its inhabitants. He was influenced by colonial and traditional Ceylonese architecture, and the role of water in it, but rejected both the idea of regionalism and the imposition of preconceived forms onto a site. Bawa became an Associate of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects in 1960. An ensuing close association with a coterie of like-minded artists and designers, including Ena de Silva, Barbara Sansoni and Laki Senanayake, produced a new awareness of indigenous materials and crafts, leading to a post-colonial renaissance of culture.

The Kandalama Hotel was constructed on the outskirts of Dambulla, Sri Lanka. The hotel was commissioned by the Aitken Spence Hotel Group to accommodate tourists visiting the nearby city of Sigiriya. Though Aitken Spence originally intended to build the hotel adjacent to Sigiriya, Bawa insisted that the hotel instead be sited eleven kilometers southeast of the historic city and rock formation. The additional distance both protects the immediate surroundings of the cultural site and allows for picturesque views of the monument across the horizon of the Kandalama Lake. The main entrance lobby is located at the end of a ramped 2.7-kilometer-long private road that branches north from a secondary arterial leading back to the center of town. From the earliest development phase of the project, Bawa was interested in developing a spatial and visual sequence of entry that culminated in the revelation of the distant view of the monument of Sigiriya only after entry to the hotel lobby. One of the most beautiful features of the hotel's design is the large, cave-like porte cochère abutting the western side of the cliff around which the hotel wraps. Guests enter the hotel under this huge slanted canopy that angles down towards the entrance to a compressed, enclosed walkway. The visitor winds through the confined tunnel-like passage, complete with a wall lined by boulders, suddenly discovering the liberating expansiveness of the open-air lobby and its panoramic view northward over the Kandalama Tank. Bawa thoughtfully choreographed this process of arrival in order to prolong and dramatize the threshold between the tree-shielded entrance drive and the spectacular views that the hotel lobby skillfully frames. Political pressures influenced the plan of the project after the schematic design phase, as it became public knowledge that portions of the east wing of the hotel were planned to encroach upon lands belonging to an old Buddhist monastic precinct. The plan was restructured to reduce the size of the eastern guest wing, which necessitated the construction of a second guest wing to the southwest of the entrance lobby. This change was a major disappointment to Bawa, as his intention had always been that the entrance lobby would be the first building visible along the long ascent to the hotel complex. Though the west wing is visible from the entrance road, it was heavily camouflaged by planting in order to minimize its visual impact on the arriving guest so it ultimately does not detract significantly from Bawa's designed approach. The final hotel design thus consists of three primary sections within a complex multi-story building that clings to the steep rock outcrop forming its eastern edge. In all, the irregularly-shaped building is approximately 430 meters in length, measured along the center of its curved plan, and between 4 and 55 meters in width. Shared facilities such as the lobby, restaurants, and pools are located in a series of broad terraced spaces at the center of the complex, while narrow extensions to the east and southwest of the public core contain the guest rooms. The east rooms are also known as the Sigiriya wing, and they provide a distant view of the Sigiriya rock across the horizon of the Kandalama Tank. This wing stretches 100 meters towards the east of the lobby and includes four stories of guest rooms. The Sigiriya wing is accessed via the second of three lobby levels, which is at the same elevation as the top floor of the guest rooms. The other three levels of guest accommodations cascade down the cliffside toward the Kandalama Tank below. Being one of Bawa's earlier moves toward minimalism in building detailing, the design of the Kandalama Hotel was shocking to admirers of the vernacular influence visible in his previous projects. However, the subtlety of the architecture itself effectively foregrounds the drama of the cliff-side topography and breathtaking views. Some of the architectural differences between the Kandalama Hotel and other Bawa projects are also logical when one considers Bawa's unwavering commitment to building climatically appropriate architecture. The Kandalama Hotel is located in the central dry zone of Sri Lanka, unlike many of Bawa's other buildings on humid oceanfront sites, and thus its design must adapt to a different climate. While pitched roofs are a necessity in coastal areas that receive heavy rain, the flat roofs at Kandalama function well in a dry climate and are less material-intensive. However, some of the distinctions between this project and Bawa's earlier works are purely aesthetic and reflect the architect's evolving personal design philosophy. The Kandalama Hotel follows the model of his later projects, in which the majority of the ornamentation comes from sculptures and artworks by other artists distributed around the building. The detailing of the architecture itself remains plainly yet harmoniously articulated in neutral tones and natural materials, including white concrete walls, black painted concrete columns, and wood or iron railings and millwork. The Kandalama Hotel is considered one of Bawa's most important works as it showcases so clearly Bawa's talent for creating affective spatial sequences and architectural narrative. The hotel was intended to serve as a building from which to view the pristine landscape of the Kandalama basin, and thus the lightness of the architectural articulation is an appropriate and successful design strategy. The hotel also features innovative building technologies and systems designed to mitigate the environmental impact of the building's operation on the catchment of the nearby lake. The Kandalama Hotel is an excellent example of how tourist facilities can be integrated into an undeveloped landscape successfully, fostering appreciation for the natural beauty of the setting while minimizing negative environmental consequences.