Under Sri Lanka’s Big Roof
Martin Filler
Sipping gin-and-tonic sundowners on the terrace of Lunuganga, the Sri
Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa’s sprawling country house, he and his
principal collaborator during the 1950s and 1960s, the Danish architect
Ulrik Plesner, now eighty-two, might impulsively decide to extend the
parapet beneath them by a few feet, or to render a distant vista more
agreeable by removing hundreds of intervening trees. Within hours these
changes would come to pass, thanks to an endless supply of cheap
semi-skilled labour and a strong local crafts heritage.
|
A wing of Bawa's country house,
Lunuganga, south of Colombo, Sri Lanka |
|
Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa
(right) with his Danish collaborator, Ulrik Plesner, circa
1960s |
There was no need for computers, let alone detailed working drawings.
First-rate execution and installation of affordable custom-designed
tiles, metalwork, and wood joinery could be taken for granted. Stone
walls—quarried nearby and set without foundations (which would only have
complicated inevitable future changes)—were laid out with strings
stretched between stakes. The only impediment was playful monkeys who
might disrupt those temporary outlines overnight.
Indigenous cultural traditions
From 1958 to 1966 Plesner was the chief architectural partner of Bawa
(1919–2003), the master builder of mixed Sri Lankan Muslim and European
ancestry who has become a cult figure to those who believe that the
lessons of the Modern Movement should be more sensitively adapted to
indigenous cultural traditions. Along with his own estate and a large
number of other private houses, Bawa designed some fifteen hotels
throughout Southeast Asia that were hugely influential in showing how
tropical resort architecture could move away from generic Hiltonism
without recourse to kitschy folklorism.
Although he has often been called the Luis Barragán of the Eastern
Hemisphere, Bawa’s works were built far beyond the geographic purview of
Eurocentric scholarship, and his masterpiece, the majestic Sri Lankan
Parliament Building of 1979–1982 in Kottke (designed after Plesner’s
departure), remains little known in the West. This serene cluster of
wood-sided pavilions with deeply overhanging roofs is set on an
artificial lake and approached across a causeway, which gives the
complex an exalted feeling akin to a temple precinct (though the
assembly chamber’s interior was loosely inspired by the British House of
Commons).
Ancient architectural treasures
Plesner’s absorbing new account, In Situ: An Architectural Memoir
from Sri Lanka, depicts Bawa’s Ceylon—which won independence from
Britain in 1948 and changed its name to Sri Lanka (Sanskrit for
“resplendent island”) in 1972—as a prelapsarian architectural paradise
where one barely had to think about creating something before it
materialized into being. When Bawa and Plesner began their
collaboration, however, the influence of Le Corbusier’s International
Style was pervasive in the developing world and the inherent advantages
of regional building methods were not immediately obvious.
|
Bawa and
Plesner's Yahapath Endera Farm School (1965), Hanwella |
Among Le Corbusier’s cardinal tenets, for example, was the flat roof,
which caused progressive architects everywhere to regard the pitched
roof as artistic anathema—even in rain-soaked regions like Sri Lanka,
where for ages it had been the most logical form of shelter. The
inadequacy of the Corbusian approach was among the invaluable lessons
Plesner learned from his extensive on-site studies of the island’s
ancient architectural treasures, which spurred a historic preservation
movement there.
Bawa and Plesner were not immune to the flat-roof fad, as this richly
illustrated volume demonstrates. But, Plesner writes, they eventually
embraced the overriding good sense of time-tested responses to building
in a tropical climate:
With the discovery of the universal Big Roof, things fell into
place.….Openness under big roofs became the key to beauty, comfort,
economy, ecology, and pleasure, as in fact it still is.
As with other, better known architectural collaborations, the
division of labour between the celebrated Bawa and the relatively
obscure Plesner remains somewhat elusive, and the who-did-what question
loomed large as I read In Situ. The Cambridge-educated Bawa, who became
an architect at age thirty-eight after a first career as a barrister,
possessed a superb eye and faultless taste, but scant practical
know-how.
The more technically adept Plesner came to Sri Lanka in 1958 and on
the recommendation of a mutual friend began working with Bawa, who just
the year before had qualified as an architect after studying at London’s
experimentally oriented Architectural Association, where he made a name
for himself among his much younger contemporaries by rarely attending
classes. Plesner’s influence was especially evident in the high
modernist finesse of their Ekala Industrial Estate of 1960-1965 in
Ja-ela, a bold concrete composition that would fit in well with Don
Judd’s later Minimalist sculptural installations in Marfa, Texas.
International attention
To his credit, Plesner does not emphasize his own importance at the
expense of his partner’s, as did the structural engineer August
Kommendant in his self-aggrandizing if hugely informative memoir 18
Years with Architect Louis I. Kahn (1975). Instead, he generously
stresses the complementary nature of his and Bawa’s respective talents:
|
Bawa and
Plesner's Ekala Industrial Estate (1960-1965), Ja-ela |
Never any explanations or arguments or theories. The communication
was almost musical; modulations of hums, puzzled looks, crooked
smiles.…What one lacked, the other had, as if we had emptied the
contents of our pockets on the table and found that together we had a
complete set of tools.
The author understandably looks back on the years with Bawa as a
period of veritable enchantment, and conveys his experiences with the
enigmatic master through dreamlike vignettes, like his site visits with
Bawa—two pukka sahibs in his partner’s massive 1936 Rolls-Royce
cabriolet, which attracted attention wherever they stopped:
….[A] crowd of children and villagers pressed around with smiles and
sounds of admiration, choreographed like a ballet scene. They touched
the car with feeling, and within a minute Geoffrey, centre stage,
speaking in the most vulgar Singhalese, had the whole crowd giggling
with delight….[and] surprise at a man, whom they thought was a European,
but who spoke like a villager.
Once their partnership began to draw international attention,
however, the principals’ laid-back attitude toward attribution frayed as
one partner got more credit or press coverage than the other. And when
the Sri Lankan government moved into the Communist Chinese sphere of
influence during the Vietnam War, Plesner felt that his time in this
increasingly menacing erstwhile Eden was drawing to a close.
After he left Sri Lanka, Plesner went on to a productive subsequent
career—first in Britain for the giant architectural engineering firm
Arup, then during the past four decades in Israel, where he served as
city architect of Jerusalem (and where his son Yohanan Plesner has
served in the Knesset for the centrist Kadima party). Yet these
reminiscences make clear that he never again enjoyed anything like the
magic of working with Bawa. In its finest passages, Plesner’s evocative
testament reminds us that even though works of architecture may seem to
be among the most durable human artefacts, nothing outdoes memory in its
ability to reconstruct the past.
Courtesy: The New York Review of Books
|