GEOFFREY MANNING BAWA

RUBINA SHAUKAT 10031AC025 KIRTI JALAN 10031AC015

GEOFFREY MANNING BAWA

Date of birth :July 23, 1919 Place of birth: Colombo Education and Career 1930-37:studied at Royal College, Colombo 1938-41:studied English at Cambridge 1942-44:studied Law in London 1946:worked briefly as a lawyer with Noel Gratien 1951:worked as an assistant architect with HH Reid at Edwards Reid and Begg in Prince Street, Colombo 1950-53:worked sporadically as a lawyer in Colombo 1954-57:studied at the Architectural Association in London 1957:joined Edwards Reid and Begg as a junior partner 1958-65:worked in close association with Ulrik Plesne 1967-89:partner with Dr. K. Poologasundram in Edwards Reid Begg 1990-97:partner in Geoffrey Bawa Associates (after 1995 with Channa Daswatte)

AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS

Pan Pacific Citation, Hawaii Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (1967) President, Sri Lanka Institute of Architects (1969) Inaugural Gold Medal at the Silver Jubilee Celebration of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects (1982) Heritage Award of Recognition, for Outstanding Architectural Design in the Tradition of Local Vernacular Architecture, for the new Parliamentary Complex at Sri Jayawardenepura, Kotte from the Pacific Area Travel Association. (1983) Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects Elected Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (1983) Conferred title of Vidya Jothi (Light of Science) in the Inaugural Honours List of the President of Sri Lanka (1985)

Teaching Fellowship at the Aga Khan Programme for Architecture, at MIT, Boston, USA (1986) Conferred title Deshamanya (Pride of the Nation) in the Honours List of the President Sri Lanka (1993) The Grate Master's Award 1996 incorporating South Asian Architecture Award (1996) The Architect of the Year Award, India (1996) Asian Innovations Award, Bronze Award Architecture, Far Eastern Economic Review (1998) The Chairman's Award of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in recognition of a lifetime's achievement in and contribution to the field of architecture (2001) Awarded Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa), University of Ruhuna (14 September 2002)

EXHIBITIONS AND PUBLICATIONS

1.

1986: exhibition at the Royal Institute of Architects, London publication of Geoffrey Bawa, Brian Brace Taylor Concept Media, Singapore

2.

1991: publication of Lunuganga, Geoffrey Bawa with Christoph Bon & Dominic Sansoni, Times Editions, Singapore
2002:publication of Bawa the complete works, David Robson Thames and Hudson, London 2004:retrospective exhibition Bawa Architect of Sri Lanka Deutches Architektur Museum, Frankfurt 2007:publication of Beyond Bawa, David Robson Thames and Hudson, London

3.

4.

FAMOUS WORKS
1.

2.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Number 11, Colombo. Sri lankan parliament building, kotte. Ena de Silva House, colombo. Ruhunu University, Matara. The kandalama hotel, dambulla. Jayawardene house, Mirissa. Garden at lunuganga, bentota. Bentota beach hotel. Blue water hotel, Wadduwa. Batujimbar Estate, Bali

IDEOLOGY
He is the principal force behind what is today known globally as tropical modernism. Although best known for his private houses and hotels, his portfolio also included schools and universities, factories and offices, public buildings and social buildings as well as the new Sri Lanka Parliament. Bawas work is characterised by a sensitivity to site and context. He produced sustainable architecture long before the term was coined, and had developed his own regional modernist stance well in advance of the theoreticians. His designs broke down the barriers between inside and outside, between interior design and landscape architecture and reduced buildings to a series of scenographically conceived spaces separated by courtyards and gardens.

NUMBER 11 33RD LANE COLOMBO

NUMBER 11 33RD LANE COLOMBO, 1960-1970

The house in 33rd Lane is an essay in architectural bricolage. In 1958 Bawa bought the third in a row of four small houses which lay along a short cul-desac at the end of a narrow suburban lane and converted it into a pied--terre with living room, bedroom, tiny kitchen and room for a servant. When the fourth bungalow became vacant this was colonized to serve as dining room and second living room. Ten years later the remaining bungalows were acquired and added into the composition and the first in the row was demolished to be replaced by a four-storey tower.

The final result is an introspective labyrinth of rooms and garden courts which together create the illusion of limitless space. Words like inside and outside lose all meaning: here are rooms without roofs and roofs without walls, all connected by a complex matrix of axes and internal vistas. If the main part of the house is an evocation of a lost world of verandahs and courtyards assembled from a rich collection of traditional devices and plundered artifacts, the new tower which rises above the car port is nothing less than a reworking of Corb's Maison Citrohan and serves as a periscope which rises from a shady nether world to give views out across the treetops towards the sea.

LUNUGANGA, BENTOTA,

LUNUGANGA, BENTOTA, 1948-1997

The garden at Lunuganga sits astride two low hills on a promontory which juts out into a brackish lagoon lying off the estuary of the Bentota River.the original bungalow still survives within its cocoon of added verandas, courtyards, and loggias.

Lunuganga was conceived as a scenographic sequence of spaces. Visitors, confused and disoriented, are shepherded up the cascade of steps which lead to the south terrace of the house.The view southwards is framed by a corridor of trees and takes in the Hill, the lake beyond and a white Buddhist dagoba on a distant hilltop: the eye runs down and up through a cone of space and leaps towards the temple and the sky.

This is not a garden of colourful flowers, neat borders and gurgling fountains: it is a civilised wilderness, an assemblage of tropical plants of different scale and texture, a composition of green on green, an ever changing play of light and shade, a succession of hidden surprises and sudden vistas, a landscape of memories and ideas. The whole of it can be taken in with a brisk fifteen-minute walk, but it requires days to explore its every corner and appreciate its changing moods. Lunuganga now seems to be so established, so natural, that it is hard to appreciate how much effort has gone into its creation. But this is a work of art, not of nature; it is the contrivance of a single mind and a hundred hands working together with nature to produce something which is supernatural. Ignore it for a week and the paths will clog up leaves; leave it for a month and the lawns will run wild; after a year the terraces will crumble and the jungle will return forever.

THE SRI LANKAN PARLIAMENT, KOTTE,

THE SRI LANKAN PARLIAMENT, KOTTE, 1979

In 1979 Bawa was asked to prepare designs for a new parliament to built at Kotte, about eight kilometers to the east of Colombo. Having flown over the site Bawa proposed that the marshy valley of the Diyavanna Oya be flooded to create a lake of 120 hectares and that the new complex be built on a knoll of high ground which would become an island at the lakes centre. Bawa conceived of the Parliament as an island capitol surrounded by a new garden city of parks and public buildings. Its cascade of copper roofs would first be seen from the approach road at a distance of two kilometers floating above the new lake at the end of the Diyavanna valley.

The design placed the main chamber in a central pavilion surrounded by a cluster of five satellite pavilions. Each pavilion is defined by its own umbrella roof of copper and seems to grow out of its own plinth, although the plinths are actually connected to form a continuous ground and first floor. The main pavilion is symmetrical about an axis running north-south through the debating chamber, the Speaker's chair and the formal entrance portal. But the power of this axis and the scale of the main roof are diffused by the asymmetric arrangement of the lesser pavilions around it. As a result, the pavilions each retain a separate identity but join together to create a single upward sweep of roofs. The use of copper in place of tile gives the roofs a thinness and the tent-like quality of a stretched skin alluding perhaps to the fabled 'brazen roofs' of Anuradhapura.

QUOTES

Architecture cannot be totally explained but must be experienced . . . -- Geoffrey Bawa

CONCLUSION
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. His international standing was finally confirmed in 2001 when he received the special chairmans award in the eighth cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.Bawa was born in 1919 and came late to architecture, only qualifying in 1957 at the age of thirty-eight, but he soon established himself as Sri Lankas most prolific and inventive architect, laying down a canon of prototypes for buildings in a tropical Asian context. Although best known for his private houses and hotels, his portfolio also included schools and universities, factories and offices, public buildings and social buildings. One of his most striking achievements is his own garden at Lunuganga which he fashioned from an abandoned rubber estate. This project occupied him for fifty years, and he used it as a test bed for his emerging ideas. The result is a series of outdoor rooms conceived with an exquisite sense of theatre as a civilized wilderness on a quiet backwater in the greater garden of Sri Lanka.