as well as privacy. Building with local materials kept costs down and ensured that his houses were sun, rain and termite-proof.
Hotel commissions raised Bawa’s profile internationally as he rejected the idea of designing to a brand’s specification, instead using Sri Lankan architectural styles as his starting point, again using local materials and applying a modernist’s clarity to the overall project. The Bentota Beach Hotel, 1969, marked the starting point. Over the course of his career, Bawa produced designs for 35 hotels and resorts, of which 13 were for Sri Lanka. Among those that were built, the Kandalama Hotel, Dambulla (now the Heritance Kandalama, pictured above), 1991, is a fine example of Bawa’s ability to blend his buildings with their landscape setting. Rejecting the client’s original site, Bawa insisted on moving the hotel 15km to a rocky outcrop where he designed the two wings of the hotel to wrap themselves around the rock, linking them with a corridor built into the stone. Today the tropical vegetation, planted on the roof and creeping up the facade, gives the impression the hotel has grown into the site rather than being constructed there.
Official recognition for his work came with the commission to design the new Sri Lankan parliament complex in 1982 at Kotte, which resulted in a series of hip-roofed pavilions allowing for multiple, airy meeting spaces, and was followed by buildings for the Ruhuna University campus in 1980.
When Bawa finally retired from Edwards Reid and Begg in his seventies, it was not to settle down and garden at his beloved Lunuganga estate, but to set up his own practice, which he ran with a small team from 1990 to 1997. This period saw a flourishing of productivity and creativity, with projects such as the Kandalama Hotel, the Lighthouse Hotel, Galle and the Blue Water Hotel in Wadduwa.What he missed, however, was the immediacy of working for private clients. One of his final projects, the Jayawardene House, Mirissa, of 1997, brings together his ability to distil local architectural principles into a minimal construction that blurs landscape and interior. The vertical silhouettes of coconut palms all but mask the long, low roof of this serene retreat.
Despite his international reputation, Bawa’s work is often forgotten or overlooked in his native country. The Ena de Silva house was demolished in 2011 to make way for a hospital car park while other built projects have been badly modified over the years. However, those sympathetically preserved buildings show Bawa’s ability to embrace both twentieth century modernism and the traditional building of his country in his distinctive Tropical Modernism, a style that has transformed architectural language far beyond Sri Lanka.
Architectural Traveller | Page 35
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