Word: sri
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...armed conflicts share elements of atrocity and tragedy, but civil wars can be the most uncivil. Often, such hostilities involve rival ethnic groups, each wanting its own identity and space and, often, these disputes are the most emotional and intractable. So it is with Sri Lanka. Colombo's decision to officially pull out of a 2002 cease-fire agreement with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.) was just a confirmation of what Sri Lankans have known for months - war has returned to the strife-torn Indian Ocean island nation...
...killed some 70,000 people since 1983, merely settled to a low simmer, with hundreds dying in skirmishes over the years and full-fledged battles breaking out in 2006 and continuing into 2007. But the abandonment of a political solution has burst whatever remained of the dam that held Sri Lanka's bloodshed in check. In the first days of this new year, fighting has killed more than 150 combatants on both sides, including the Tigers' head of military intelligence. On Jan. 8, a roadside bomb outside Colombo killed D.M. Dassanayake, Sri Lanka's Minister for Nation-Building...
...surprise that a society constantly under the threat of war unravels. Several hundred thousand civilians have been displaced by the conflict; Sri Lanka has high rates of domestic violence and alcoholism, and the suicide rate is among the worst in Asia. Reacting to the end of the cease-fire, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon urged Sri Lankans to find an end to the conflict "through a political solution." Alas, in a society where politics turns on religion and identity, such a solution has proved impossible - as two and a half decades of broken plans attest...
...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...