Recently, I found myself immersed in the gallerist Niru Ratnam’s beautifully wrought paean to his aesthetic forebear Geoffrey Bawa, and, perhaps, his own immigrant parents and a specific time and place. Swiftly, in my head at least, I stepped into his hired tuk-tuk, tottering about the end of the world.
Ratnam has been on the trail of the aforementioned architect for most of his life, and for the August 2023 issue of WoI – swept up, perhaps, by the spirit of a place he was yanked away from as a two-year-old – visited Number 11, his home in Colombo, capital of both men’s native country and scene of so much strife between 1983 and 2009. ‘Perhaps,’ he ruminates, ‘it’s unfair to expect Bawa to have commented much on the civil war – most Sri Lankans did not, and artistic responses to it only really started to take shape in its aftermath.’ About the architect's sanctuary, he concludes: ‘It is more fruitful to think about Number 11 as an alternative vision of the nation to the turbulent realities of those years.’
I look at Bawa’s buildings and ask myself questions that prove abstract and unanswerable. Could it be that contractual obligation determined Bawa’s fidelity to personal self-expression? Did this whisperer to the environment go out of his way to invite nature – that is, the outside world in all its wild complexities – into his work? As with his life philosophy and draughtsmanship, observations on Bawa’s life always come back to the tension between our perceptions of naturalism and Modernism , unspoken nativeness and foreign classicisms, and the practitioner’s ultimate poetics, speaking to the unmistakable dreaminess of form, which should not be mistaken for formlessness.
Interior view of the living room at Number 11, Geoffrey Bawa’s house in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Photograph: Iwan Baan, 2026. © Iwan Baan
Ratnam tells us that in Bawa’s rather sparse yet brimful-of-life home, ‘nature and light’, rather than manmade chaos, ‘pour in’. The architect celebrated cultural pluralism through his ‘diverse collection of objects, wall hangings and furniture’. It is a house in which one ‘might climb the stairs to the top and see a world beyond Sri Lanka’s shores’. It is both outward-looking and somehow inwardly meditative, ‘a house to live in and think of better versions of the present and the future’.
And here we are, in the future. It is, perhaps, a decades-in-the-making future, since Bawa, who forsook a career in law to pursue architecture, essentially chose a different kind of discipline and dream, constructing it for himself and for us all. Vitra Design Museum ’s expansive retrospective of his practice, Geoffrey Bawa: Architecture for the Senses , curated by John Deurell and his team, explores precisely how he developed a distinctive language that merged Modernist principles with Sri Lanka’s cultural heritage, climate, landscape and craftsmanship.
An aerial view of Number 11. Photograph: Iwan Baan, 2026. © Iwan Baa
This is not merely a celebration of a man concerned with Sri Lankan heritage. Rather it invites us to consider it as an immense, immersive survey of a visual philosopher, poet and maker of things who, to borrow from Edouard Glissant in conversation with the cultural theorist and filmmaker Manthia Diawara, ‘consented not to be a single being’. Although his body of work does not concern itself with constructing artificial demarcations between his life and practice, George Bawa was not only a man constituted of a ‘multiple beings’, as it were, but a man committed to formalism as well as his inner chi .
Although Bawa worked at the top of his game for more than half a century, often with the barest of available material in an unyielding economy and a country gripped by ethnic opprobrium, open hostilities and the ugliness of war, he experimented in his practice with the kinesis of play, pleasure and, essentially, basic functionality.
Exterior view of St Thomas’ Preparatory School showing bas-reliefs by Anil Gamini Jayasuriya. Photograph: Geoffrey Bawa, c1962. © Geoffrey Bawa and Lunuganga Trusts. All rights reserved
Interior view of the library at the University of Ruhuna, Matara, Sri Lanka. Photograph: Iwan Baan, 2026. © Iwan Baan
From the available photographs and video clips, one discerns his functionality as refracted through a frill-free grace, easiness of the soul and calming gorgeousness one associates with an orchestral conductor at home within his sonic construction. In their contemplation, as in the imaginary, or even auditory, senses they exude, Bawa’s are a form of visual lyric. To look at Iwan Baan’s photographs of his homes, particularly Lunuganga in Bentola and its sprawling garden, is to get lost and found within a kind of sound.
The buildings, including the famous 19th-century Buddhist temple that Bawa reimagined as a blue-roofed oasis floating on a lake, or so it seems, emit haunting notes of a ravanahatha , a two-stringed lute associated with the ancient king Ravana, who is believed to have used music as an offering to the Hindu god Shiva. I let my mind roam through the thicket within which some of his buildings are located, and heard the wailing sound of a slide guitar and the soothing wails of a sarangi , an Indian fiddle exulted for its intricate tonality.
Less abstractly, Architecture for the Senses brings together more than 250 works, including original drawings, models, furniture, archival material and photography, as well as newly commissioned images by Baan. It offers a comprehensive look at Bawa’s approach to creating buildings that are experienced through movement, atmosphere and connection to nature .
Roof detail, New Sri Lankan Parliament, Kotte, Sri Lanka. Photographer: Iwan Baan, 2026. © Iwan Baan
Akhtar, perspectival drawing, New Sri Lankan Parliament, graphite on tracing paper, 1979. © Geoffrey Bawa and Lunuganga Trusts. All rights reserved
Bawa eschewed archetypal Western genius for the spiritual fraud that it is. He valued collaboration over solo acclaim. He regarded the environment, as well as flesh-and-blood beings, as his true collaborators. In his long and varied collaboration with other architects, landscapers and designers, such as Ulrik Plesner, Vasantha Jacobsen, Ena de Silva and a Sri Lankan architect simply known as Ratnavibushana (Anura), he took on several bold commissions.
Two in particular stand out. The building that announced his long arrival: the Parliament building in Kotte, the administrative hub of Sri Lanka. And the Kandalama Hotel in Dambulla, which most readily shows Bawa’s construction as poetry.
Kandalama is built on a rock, overlooking a reservoir and a forest ; its most dominant feature is the cave-like porte-cochère on the western side of the cliff around which the entire structure wraps itself. The building juts out of dense foliage, and makes room for wild animals to roam beneath. Looking at it from whatever angle, you are confronted by – or, rather, invited into – its inner sanctum, as both an escape into a dream and a facility of visceral assurance, to the extent a building can provide it. At night, the interiors blow up into gorgeous fire.
Tim Beacher, sectional elevation through the site, Kandalama Hotel, ink on tracing paper, 1994. © Geoffrey Bawa and Lunuganga Trusts. All rights reserved
Apparently, you cannot look at Kandalama; you have to experience it. And then you can never unsee it, never unfeel it. I have not experienced it, therefore in some ways I do not believe it is actually manmade. It seems to spring from nature, but then again, perhaps nature, as nature does, simply imposed itself on Bawa’s work, as it might surely have similarly affected generations of Sri Lankan architects.
Bawa is often associated with Tropical Modernism , which to me cuts both ways. On the one hand, it reminds me of the salient themes and foundational visual sensibilities of another aesthetic master, the filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Like him, Bawa believed in natural light, but also experimented with local objects, Asian materials and the local environment, without yielding to tempting faux nativeness. On the other hand, movements labelled ‘tropical’ anything (modernity, language, culinary etc), Brazil’s Tropiclismo movement and, to an extent, magical tales of eastern ‘mughals’ and governed ‘Indo-Asia’, do not come without the commercial enterprise of the colonial explorer. That the work of such an obviously Modernist architect would require refraction through his domiciled origins should exhaust any committed student of architecture.
Not so long ago, the Nigerian-born, Berlin-based photographer Akinbiyi Akinbode had a major exhibition at the Kunstverein, in Hannover, titled Sometimes to be Lost is to be Found and to be Found is to be Lost Anew. I cannot think of a more resonant, though retrofitted description, time, land and spaces apart, for the legacy of the understudied but ubiquitous Sri Lankan spirit whisperer, Geoffrey Bawa.
‘Geoffrey Bawa: Architecture for the Senses’ runs from 26 September 2026 – 28 February 2027 at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, before travelling to Hong Kong
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