Geoffrey Bawa
| Geoffrey Bawa | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 23, 1919 British Ceylon |
| Died | May 27, 2003 (aged 83) Colombo, Sri Lanka |
| Nationality | Sri Lankan |
| Alma mater |
St Catharine's College, Cambridge Royal College, Colombo |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Awards |
Aga Khan Special Chairman’s Award See below |
| Practice |
Edwards, Reid and Begg Geoffrey Bawa Associates |
| Buildings |
Sri Lankan Parliament Building University of Ruhuna |
Deshamanya Geoffrey Manning Bawa, FRIBA (23 July 1919 – 27 May 2003) was a Sri Lankan architect. He is the most renowned architect in Sri Lanka and was among the most influential Asian architects of his generation. He is the principal force behind what is today known globally as "tropical modernism".
Geoffrey Bawa was born on 23 July 1919. His father was Justice B. W. Bawa a wealthy and successful lawyer, of Muslim and English parentage, and his mother, Bertha Marianne Schrader, was of mixed German, Scottish and Sinhalese descent. He had one older brother Bevis Bawa who became a renowned landscape architect.
He was educated at Royal College, Colombo after which he studied English and Law, 1938, at St Catharine's College, Cambridge gaining a BA (English Literature Tripos) and went on to study law at Middle Temple, London becoming a Barrister in 1944. Returning to Ceylon, after World War II, he worked for a Colombo law firm. After the death of his mother, he left the profession and soon left in 1946 to travel for two years, going to the Far East, across the United States, and finally to Europe and almost settling in Italy. By the time he was 28 years old, he had spent a third of his life time away from Sri Lanka. During his time in Italy, he planned to buy a villa and settle down, but that did not happen, and by 1948 he had returned to Sri Lanka. Bawa bought an abandoned rubber estate on the south-west coast of the island between Colombo and Galle at Lunuganga, planning to create an Italian garden from a tropical wilderness. However, he soon found that his ideas were compromised by his lack of technical knowledge. In 1951, he was apprenticed to H.H. Reid, the sole surviving partner of the Colombo architectural practice Edwards, Reid and Begg. In 1952 Reid died, but Bawa still aspired to a career in architecture, so he returned to England, after spending a year at Cambridge, he enrolled as a student at the Architectural Association in London. To this day he is remembered as the tallest, oldest, and most outspoken student of his generation at AA. In 1957, at the age of 38 he returned to Sri Lanka qualified as an architect to take over what was left of Reid's practice.
...
Wikipedia