Word: bawa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Geoffrey Bawa is well known in his native Sri Lanka and in design circles, but wider fame has eluded the architect who died in 2003 at the age of 84. Part of the reason is that the building style Bawa pioneered - melding Asian and global design traditions in a way that suited the requirements of monsoon climates - has become ubiquitous. Verandahs, water features, local craftwork, lush landscaping: today these kinds of elements are taken for granted in resorts, spas and villas all over the region, and it is easy to believe that it was ever thus...
...publication of David Robson's Beyond Bawa: Modern Masterworks of Monsoon Asia - a highly informative study, if at times a little dryly written - will hopefully boost the architect's posthumous profile. It also confronts Bawa's reputation for snobbery. Bawa, grants Robson, was a "paternalistic employer" who paid people poorly and seemed "to have had little understanding of how his assistants actually made ends meet." (Such notoriety dogged Bawa throughout his career. When, in 1986, a retrospective of his work was organized at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London - the first large-scale Bawa exhibit outside Sri Lanka...
...Born in 1919 to Eurasian parents - his father was a wealthy Muslim-English lawyer, his mother German-Scottish-Sinhalese - Bawa was, yes, raised with that proverbial silver spoon. Cambridge-educated, he enjoyed an aimless youth of profligate spending, sumptuous taste and spiffy automobiles. The title page of Geoffrey Bawa, a seminal Singaporean monograph published to coincide with the London exhibition, is a money shot of Bawa's twinkling Rolls-Royce. Contemporary Donald Friend - a peripatetic, chain-smoking Australian artist and compulsive diarist - grumbled about Bawa's "grand ducal airs...