Memory, modernity and history: the landscapes of Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka, 1948–1998

Abstract

This paper discusses the landscape garden of Lunuganga, Sri Lanka, designed by the architect Geoffrey Bawa for himself after 1948. It assesses this space as a site of memory and a location where modernity and history are negotiated. The present paper theorizes the making of Lunuganga in relation to the production of modernity in Sri Lanka and negotiation of the island's relationship to colonial and pre-colonial histories. The island of Sri Lanka has a long history of the development of cultural landscapes. Bawa's landscapes can be located within these traditions. Furthermore, the time he spent in Europe furnished him with an understanding of the picturesque landscape tradition. Lunuganga could be described as a site where these (colonial) histories and vernacular traditions re-staged or re-presented the modern in contemporary Sri Lanka. Bawa's landscapes can also be ‘read’ as ‘sites of memory’, where, although of the modern era, the past is recalled. The landscape of Lunuganga references negotiations between adoption of a universal modern, with its taint of colonial subjugation, the neglect of this troubled past and the pursuit of an uncomplex indigenism and, in so doing, intervenes in the production of modernity in Sri Lanka.

Keywords:

• Geoffrey Bawa
• Lunuganga
• landscape
• memory
• modernity
• history

Notes

 1. For further discussions about the place of the modern in contemporary Sri Lanka see also the work of Pradeep Jeganathan and Qadri Ismail (1995), Tariq Jazeel (2007) and Catherine Braun and Tariq Jazeel (2009).

 2. For vernacular examples of such ambalamas at Kurunegala and Karagahagedera see Lewcock etal. (1998, 72–3).

 3. Kandy was the last independent state in the island until its capture by the British in 1815. This act brought the whole of Ceylon under a unified control for the first time in its history.

 4. These palms (and parts of the hotel) were destroyed in the Tsunami which devastated much of the coastal belt on the island in 2004. The hotel has since been restored.

 5. The historian and anthropologist Bernard Cohn has written ‘in [colonial] India the British entered a new world that they tried to comprehend using their own forms of knowing and thinking' (Cohn 1996, 4).

 6. Although Taylor refers to the arrangement of the interiors of Bawa's buildings with this phrase, it can also usefully be deployed to describe the relationship between the architect's exteriors and interiors, between landscape and architecture.

 7. The biographical information on Bawa that follows is taken from David Robson (2007).

 8. This interest in vernacular design in Scandinavia had its origins in the writings and theories of the English Arts and Crafts movement.

 9. Plesner was not the first to direct attention to Sri Lanka's vernacular building traditions. Andrew Boyd, an English planter turned architect, had written about these in 1947 (Boyd 1947, 25–40).

10. That is an image of architecture and design fostered by the Congres Internationale d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) with Le Corbusier as its notional head.

11. For example, in The Guardian travel section in March 2010, the firm ‘Experience Sri Lanka’ offered accommodation at Lunuganga and promised ‘light-filled spaces [that] look onto the lake, rice fields, hills and magnificent garden’.