Word: lanka
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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...
...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 - the only real attention given was a snarky article in Building Design by London-based Sri Lankan architect Shanti Jayawardene, slamming Bawa as an élitist from a privileged background who catered only to the rich...
...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...
...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...
...today, as an affirmative-action policy created a prosperous Malay middle class that had never before existed. In Asia, only the nations of Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Brunei rank higher than Malaysia in the U.N.'s Human Development Index. Most impressively, while other multiethnic nations like Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka and Rwanda fractured into conflict, Malaysia has largely kept peace between groups that include Muslim Malays (about 50%); Buddhist and Christian Chinese (roughly 25%); Hindu, Sikh and Muslim Indians (less than 10%); and indigenous peoples, who abide by many faiths including animism (around 10%). "Our biggest achievement is that...