01 A second career started late
He went back to school. He took his diploma from the Architectural Association in London in 1956 and his British architect's accreditation in 1957, and returned to Sri Lanka newly qualified at thirty-eight. He died on 27 May 2003, aged eighty-three. The second career lasted some forty-five years; parliament came in its twenty-sixth.
Between 1959 and 1967 he worked in partnership with the Danish architect Ulrik Plesner. In 2001, two years before his death, he received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture's Chairman's Award for his life's work.
02 A garden before a diploma
He bought the estate in 1948, eight years before he was an architect, and spent the next fifty remaking it.
In 1948 — the year of Sri Lanka's independence, and aged nearly thirty — Bawa bought a former rubber and cinnamon plantation near Bentota. Around twenty-five acres. He called it Lunuganga, "salt river" in Sinhala. He was not yet an architect: he was a barrister with an abandoned estate.
He worked it for fifty years, from 1948 to 1998. Lunuganga is not a building with a garden, it is a garden with buildings: terraces, ponds, stairways and open views toward the lake, composed as a succession of framed pictures. He described it himself: "The area one was dealing with was about twenty-five acres but with its surrounding lakes the land beyond seems to go on forever."
03 Four houses turned into one
His town house has an equally patient history. In 1959 he began renting one of four row houses on 33rd Lane in Colombo, owned by the lawyer, writer and arts patron Harold Peiris. Within less than a decade he had bought all four and merged them into a single dwelling. He lived there from 1960 to 1998.
What is interesting is that he conceived it as the exact reverse of Lunuganga. Where the estate opens onto endless views, the Colombo house compresses: you enter through a narrow passage, emerge into a generous living room and end in an intimate bedroom. One is expansion; the other, deliberate contraction. The same architect, two opposite grammars, at the same time.
04 What building for the tropics means
Bawa's approach is usually described as regional or tropical modernism, and in practice it comes down to something simple: in a climate of 30 degrees and 75% humidity all year, the answer is not to seal the building and chill it, but to open it and let the air move. Deep verandas, courtyards, sheets of water, long eaves that give shade and shed the downpour, and vegetation coming inside instead of staying out.
The most extreme example is the Heritance Kandalama hotel, built between 1991 and 1994 on a wooded ridge. The building was deliberately left to be colonised by vegetation: today creepers cover the entire facade and the terraces are gardens. It is not a hotel with forest views; it is a hotel the forest is eating, and that was the plan.
That grammar — deep veranda, courtyard, water, shade — was copied in hotels across South and Southeast Asia in the decades that followed, almost always without crediting the source. If you have ever stayed in an open-plan Asian hotel with ponds and long eaves, you have slept in a translation of Bawa.
05 How to see it today
Here is the paradox that closes the story. The Kotte parliament, his greatest public work, is effectively unvisitable: permission is needed a week in advance and, if you are a foreigner, must be arranged through a Sri Lankan travel agency. You see it from the far bank of the lake, and little else.
His house and his garden, by contrast, are open and run by the foundation that bears his name. The Colombo house is visited on forty-five-minute tours, Monday to Friday at 10:00, 14:00 and 15:30, Saturdays at 11:00 and 16:00 and Sundays at 11:00, for 5,000 rupees for foreigners. Lunuganga opens daily with ninety-minute tours at 11:00, 14:00 and 15:00, for 20 dollars. Booking is advisable for the house; for the garden it is not needed.
Put another way: you can walk through the architect's bedroom for about fifteen euros, but to get near the building he designed for his country you need an agency and a week of paperwork. It is a fairly exact summary of what Kotte is as a capital.
