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He cut a mysterious style in public, mostly in black, dark glasses and later fancy walking sticks, which went on to round up an image that was tall and strong full of charisma, similar to the buildings he brought to life which are many, still reflecting the exuberance of the man who designed them.

Geoffery Bawa

Architect Geoffery Bawa suffered a massive stroke in 1998 which left him paralysed until his demise earlier this week. Younger brother of the well known naturalist Bevis Bawa who created a sprawling garden down south named "Brief". The Bawa brothers hailed from Negombo. Geoffery who initially qualified himself as a lawyer later tuned on to his fascinating odyssey as an Architect which was to serve Sri Lanka triumphantly.

Serendib serendipity

'Serendib': The ancient Arab name for Sri Lanka. 'Serendipity': A word coined by Horace Walpole and inspired by his tale 'The three Princes of Serendip', whose heroes were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.

Excerpts from an article "Serendib serendipity" based on the work of Architect Geoffery Bawa written by David Robson and Channa Daswatte published by courtesy of AA Files in the Sunday Observer Magazine in July 1998.

This year marks both the fiftieth anniversary of Sri Lanka's independence and the fiftieth year of Geoffery 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 verandhas 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.

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 has 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.

Bawa gathered around himself a group of designers and artists from many different backgrounds who, inspired by a growing appreciation and 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, designer Barbara Sansoni and batik artist Ena de Silva, all of whose figures prominently in buildings designed by the practice.

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.

Two projects hold the key to an understanding of Bawa's work: the garden at Lunuganga which he has continued to fashion for almost fifty years and his own house in Colombo. Both have been in the many years in the making, both has served as test beds for ideas, both take an existing context as their starting point. The town-house is a heaven 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, reducing a vast open landscape to a controlled series of outdoor rooms, a civilised garden within the larger garden wilderness of Sri Lanka.

Bawa's architecture is a subtle blend of the modern and traditional, of East and West, of formal and picturesque: he exploits the climate and fertility of his native land in order to break down the artificial segregation of inside and outside, of buildings and landscapes: he draws on every twist and turn of his country's colourful history to create an architecture which is fitting to its place, but he has also scoured the world for ideas with which to inform an architecture which is of its age. (P.A.B.)

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