Word: robson
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...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...
...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...
...Australia generates 1.4% of global carbon emissions - mostly from coal-fired power stations - and that share is shrinking as Chinese and Indian emissions soar. No matter what Canberra does, the effects on the world's climate "are likely to be extremely small," says Australian National University economist Alex Robson, "almost certainly zero." Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull argues, with Howard, that climate change cannot be addressed without coordinated action by all major emitters. But Labor, he says, takes the view that "we must purify ourselves, regardless of how poor it makes us to become pure...