Geoffrey Bawa : The father of Sri Lankan Architecture

by Husna Inayathullah

Geoffrey Bawa was born on July 23, 1919. He is the most renowned architect in Sri Lanka, who is called the father of Sri Lankan Architecture. He is the principle force behind what is today known globally as ‘Tropical Modernism'. One of his popular works was the dismantling and reconstructing Ena de Silva's house in Lunuganga, Bentota.

Bawa was invited by Ena de Silva to build a house on a small plot of land in Cinnamon Gardens. She expected the house to be modern and open, but which would embody features of the traditional manor houses in which she had lived as a child. Bawa’s solution employed the same elements as the Galle house, but he now carved them out of a solid form. The result is a totally introspective house which emphasises the voids as much as the solids and which allows a free flow of space from inside to outside.

Bawa's father was Justice Benjamin Bawa, a wealthy and successful lawyer of Muslim and English parentage. His mother, Bertha Marianne Schrader was of mixed German, Scottish and Sinhalese descent. He had one older brother Bewis Bawa who became a renowned landscape architect.

Bawa was educated at Royal College, Colombo. He studied English and Law in 1938 at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge and studied law at Middle Temple, London, becoming a Barrister in 1944. He worked for a Colombo law firm on his return to Sri Lanka.

Bawa gave up his profession as a lawyer and soon left in 1946 to travel for two years, going to the Far East, across the United States, and finally to Europe and almost settling down in Italy after his mother's death. By the time he was 28 years, he had spent a third of his life time away from Sri Lanka. During his time in Italy, he planned to buy a villa and settle down, but that did not happen, and by 1948 he had returned to Sri Lanka.

Bawa bought an abandoned rubber estate on the south-west coast of the island between Colombo and Galle at Lunuganga. He was planning to create an Italian garden in tropical wilderness. However, he soon found that his ideas were compromised by his lack of technical knowledge. In 1951, he was apprenticed to H. H. Reid, the sole surviving partner of the Colombo architectural practice. In 1957, at the age of 38 he returned to Sri Lanka qualified as an architect to take over what was left of Reid's practice.

Lunuganga Estate was Bawa's country home which he built in 1947. The project inspired him to become an architect.

He left behind Lunuganga Estate to the Geoffrey Bawa Trust after his demise on May 27, 2003. The garden is now open to the public from 9 am to 5 pm. The buildings on the estate are run as a country house hotel.