“Light from reflected surfaces was important to Bawa,” says Sri Lankan architect Channa Daswatte to the audience he is leading through the walkthrough of the Geoffrey Bawa Pavillion at the AD Design Show. Fitted out with Phantom Hands’ re-editions of the Sri Lankan master’s furniture and product designs, the pavilion itself seems to embody this tenet of Bawa’s, dappled as it is in light that casts soft-edged shadows. We have only just begun the walkthrough but a subtle recalibration seems to be taking place. Voices have dropped to murmurs, then silence; steps are slower, and surprisingly, not a single phone has screeched out its presence. It’s almost as if the pavilion’s sense of calm has permeated the air and gentled its occupants. The audience’s rapt attention might be partly courtesy Daswatte’s twinkling retellings of his mentor’s design process, but it is equally true that Bawa’s supremely contemplative spaces often had this effect on people.
That was in fact, the primary reason that Aparna Rao, one half of the founding team of Bangalore-based Phantom Hands, decided to borrow inspiration for this pavilion from the Sandella garden room at Lunuganga. “I was transformed by that space,” she says softly.
The idea for the pavilion, though, like so many of Bawa’s design interventions, was sparked by the need to solve a problem. Early this year in Milan, Phantom Hands was set to show pieces from the Geoffrey Bawa Collection at a gallery in Brera. The gallery’s black walls, Rao felt, were not in keeping with Bawa’s sensibilities. To create a setting better aligned with them, she came up with the idea of draping the walls with a light, hand-stitched tapestry modelled on the Sandella garden room that had so moved her on her first visit there.
When Daswatte saw the setup at Brera, he came up with the idea of creating a travelling tent exhibition. By happy coincidence, AD India’s former editorial head Komal Sharma walked in just then. “It felt intimate,” Komal recalls about the space, adding, “And without too much thought about how , I instinctively felt that it would be wonderful to have this atmosphere, these objects, and these stories at the AD Design show in Mumbai.”
Sharma proposed an exclusive pavilion at the show, just a short seven months away, and the team at Phantom Hands, galvanized by the idea, went into all-hands-on-deck mode. “There was almost a sense of being on a mission,” recalls Deepak Srinath, cofounder of the studio. Eventually, the ADDS pavilion was shaped by two primary ideas: that of the Sandella garden room, and Daswatte’s suggestion, in passing, that it be modelled on Buddhist Vesak paper lanterns.
The completed pavilion embodied yet another Bawa-ism as narrated by Daswatte. “He was very good at taking the skills and objects from around him, and putting them together to create quiet spaces.” The structure’s walls were fashioned out of the quilted cotton fabric that Phantom Hands uses to wrap its furniture pieces pre-shipping. The drawing of a tree from the Dedduwa Lake landscape was rendered by local Bengaluru artist Dushyanth HP. The single carpet across the pavilion was made by a small weaving community in Mirzapur, and the antique wooden pillars that held up the entire structure were borrowed from Rao’s aunt’s collection. “There were also about 40 people from Phantom Hands who worked very intensely and continuously for about four months to make this happen,” Srinath recalls. It’s easy to imagine Bawa being pleased.
Pausing at the Kandalama chair during the walkthrough, Daswatte laughingly recounted for his audience Bawa's occasional “borrowings” from other designers. “He could identify a good thing when he saw it—and believed that design ideas could be shared!” The audience chuckled along, but as Daswatte explained further, a greater understanding dawned. This was, is, a way of making intrinsic to the Indian subcontinent, where even crafts that have been developed and handed down in an unbroken chain, are open-ended enough to create new links and grow in new directions. It is fitting then, that Phantom Hands, a brand whose focus has been on modern renditions of craft traditions, would be the ones to engineer this pavilion into being.
It is not an exaggeration to say that in its short life, the Bawa pavilion at the AD Design Show achieved something close to what Bawa had orchestrated at Lunuganga. The quietly contemplative audience that drifted out of it post Dastwatte’s walkthrough was proof.
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