The Bawa Garden
Excerpts from the book - BAWA | The Sri Lankan Gardens by David Robson and Dominic Sansoni
Wiki Commons. See more stunning images on AD website here.
Lunuganga was the country house of renowned Sri Lankan architect, Geoffrey Bawa. Trained as a lawyer, he came back to his homeland and was greatly impressed by his brother, Bevis’s garden and set about to make a better one himself. This kick-started his interest in architecture, for which he trained later on. When his idea of settling down in Italy and making his dream garden there did not pan out, he returned to Sri Lanka. This is the story of Lunuganga woven through excerpts from the book.
I love this country and I must find a site where I would be happy, preferably near a river or a lake. If I can’t find one here then I shall have to comb the earth until I do.
- Geoffrey Bawa
But he didn’t have to resort to that. He came across Lunuganga, a cinnamon estate during the Dutch occupation and a rubber plantation under the British. He immediately fell in love with it, and set about making it the beautiful space it is now.
“Lunuganga was conceived as a series of spaces to be moved through at leisure or occupied at certain times and for certain activities. Starting from the house it is possible to set out in any direction and combine the different parts of the garden into a variety of sequences.”
Geoffrey never sat down, and drew up a master plan for the garden: each move was simply a response to what was there, to the ‘spirit of the place.’
“Over the years, the original rubber trees were replaced by a variety of trees and shrubs. But this is not a garden of flower beds and gurgling fountains, of ordered patterns and pretty ponds: it is civilized wilderness, a monochromatic composition of green on green, an ever-changing play of light and shade, a carefully orchestrated succession of hidden surprised and sudden views.”
“…but the interior of the house was used only for sleeping, and life at Lunuganga focused mainly on the garden.”
“Lunuganga functioned for Bawa as a distant retreat, an outpost on the edge of the known world, challenging the infinite horizon of the ocean to the west and the endless switchback of hills to the east, reducing an open landscape to a series of outdoor room, a civilized garden within the larger garden of Sri Lanka. Today, it seems so natural, so established, that it is difficult to appreciate how much effort went into its creation. Nor is it apparent just how much maintenance work is needed to achieve such a precise level of careful casualness.”
The whole estate is a series of stunning views and the house makes use of these in ample amounts, true to Bawa’s ideology -
Rational building gives presence to both function and form, admits beauty and pleasure as well as purpose. These are my basic thoughts on details; the proportion of rooms, doors and windows; the heights, the sweeps, the pitches of roofs; where one looks from a room, at what, and through what, at what is to be seen; how open or closed a view from a room should be.
- Geoffrey Bawa