Word: bawa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Much of your comedy is based on the geek subculture. Are you still a geek, or have you grown out of it? Misha Bawa, VANCOUVER...
...Robson points out, though, that many of Bawa's projects were anything but patrician, like the Hanwella Convent Farm (Sri Lanka, 1971) and the Bandarawela Chapel (Sri Lanka, 1961), erected as a modest hill retreat for nuns. The austere geometric forms of the chapel owed much to the prevailing international Modernism of the moment, which Bawa was steeped in from his days as a student at the famed Architectural Association in London during the late 1950s. But Bawa's almost exclusive use of local materials was an incipient sign of the homespun revolution to come. His signature "Contemporary Vernacular" style...
...Bawa's impact on Asian architects - Sri Lankan Milroy Perera, Singaporean Mok Wei Wei and many others documented by Robson - is certainly plain to see. All have adapted the basic regionalist Bawa style, which Bawa only loosely outlined. First, he wrote in a 1968 article, "a building must, at the very least, satisfy the needs that gave it birth, both physical and spiritual." Second, it "must be in accord and in sympathy with the ambience [of its setting]." And "there must be a knowledgeable and true use of the materials with which you build...
...Thus both Lalyn Collure's forested Boulder Garden Hotel (Sri Lanka, 2002) and Bawa's landmark Polontalawa Estate Bungalow (Sri Lanka, 1964) - where the main roof appears to rest, at either end, upon two colossal rocks - emphasize harmony with nature. The most striking photograph in Robson's book shows the candlelit open-air restaurant of Collure's hotel sublimely canopied by a jumbo black boulder. Mok's Morley Road House (Singapore, 1996) blends ancient Chinese garden designs - a koi pond, bamboo hedges - with sharp Modernist forms while blurring inside/outside spatial distinctions. Just so, Bawa's naturally ventilated Ena de Silva...
...live these days with rock-star architects - Gehry, Koolhaas, Libeskind - hailed as heroic and solitary prodigies, bringing forth great edifices. While it is tempting to lobby for Bawa's inclusion in this pantheon, Robson argues that he "should not be viewed as a lone genius, but rather as someone who operated within a circle of sympathetic friends." In fact, no architect is an island, and several individuals - notably Friend, Danish architect Ulrik Plesner, and artists Barbara Sansoni and Laki Senanayake - influenced Bawa's vernacular experiments. As Robson's title suggests, Bawa's legacy, if not his personal renown, continues...