The last few months, though troubled on so many other fronts and with little signs of immediate improvement, have however been something of a renaissance for Sri Lankan art following the pandemic, with an eminent group of Sri Lanka’s arts and cultural organisations and galleries coming together in January to form an informal coalition of sorts to amplify the power of their individual events, exhibitions, and initiatives and build a cultural calendar for 2022.
One key exhibition of the first half of 2022, “Geoffrey Bawa: It is Essential to be There” opened on 1 February, and concluded yesterday (3). Over the course of the exhibition, the Geoffrey Bawa Trust also held several other small events and discussions to further push the envelope of discussions around Geoffry Bawa, post-colonial Sri Lankan architecture, and the architects of the time who would go on to play pivotal roles in shaping modern Sri Lankan architecture.
Leading up to the conclusion of “It is Essential to be There”, the Trust hosted its final discussion, “Contemporaries: Considering Architectural Archives”, a panel that examined four of Sri Lanka’s most renowned modern architects (and contemporaries of Geoffrey Bawa) – Justin Samarasekera, Minette de Silva, Valentine Gunasekera, and Panini Tennakoon – and what formats each of their archives might take through the eyes of architects who have interacted with these architects or conducted in-depth study of their work. The panel comprised Nela De Zoysa, Anooradha Siddiqi, Milinda Pathiraja, and Sumedha Kelegama and was moderated by Geoffrey Bawa Trust Chairperson Channa Daswatte and Geoffrey Bawa Trust Curator of Art and Archival Collections Shayari de Silva.
Justin Samarasekera
Nela De Zoysa spoke on the work of her father Justin Samarasekera, who studied in India and the UK before coming back to Sri Lanka where he would spend his life building up architectural education in Sri Lanka, going on to help create the Ceylon Institute of Architecture (now the Sri Lanka Institute of Architecture) in collaboration with the Royal Institute of British Architects, to sit as First Chair of the Board of Education at the City School of Architecture, and set up his own practice – Justin Samarasekera Associates. Samarasekera worked tirelessly to make architectural education available at all levels, setting up educational frameworks in many institutions and making a name for himself as the father of Sri Lankan architecture education.
Minette de Silva
For a very long time, Minette de Silva was an unsung hero of Sri Lankan architecture, despite her being a trailblazer for being the first-ever registered female Sri Lankan architect.
Through her years of study of de Silva’s work, Anooradha Siddiqi shared that the most accurate definition of de Silva as a practitioner was experimental. A cornerstone of de Silva’s was working local arts and crafts into her projects, and one thing that set her apart, back in her heyday (the 1950s and 1960s), was how she would approach designing buildings, introducing concepts like questionnaires for clients, something that is still relatively unusual even today.
Valentine Gunasekera
Milinda Pathiraja spoke about Valentine Gunasekera’s work and how it explored the idea of modernity and technology at a very critical time in our postcolonial history. Gunasekera’s work evidence his thought process of building a new Sri Lankan style – moving away colonial and vernacular precedence of the time and exploring raw, new forms of modern architecture that met the needs of the rising middle class in a context that made sense in our urban context.
Panini Tennakoon
Much of old Colombo’s cityscape is defined by Panini Tennakoon and his tenure at the Public Works Department. Some of his more iconic buildings include the Department of National Archives building and the Colpetty Police Station, work that directly brook the topic of archiving and why it is important, given the renovations these buildings are currently undergoing.
Tennakoon’s work saw great effort taken to account for the harsh edge our climate can have and protect his work from the sun, while also finding ways to take the edge off the heat.
Archiving the work of architects who have shaped our identity
Each of these architects have explored concepts of modernism, and as the panel discussed, the connotations of the word modernism can vary; some, like Minette de Silva, never used the word or encouraged it, others while not using the word, were proponents of the modernist movement through their work.
In Pathiraja’s words: “They practised in a pivotal point of our post-colonial history. It was 10-15 years after independence, and we were building our modern society; they contributed to it.”
But what of archiving? “Geoffrey Bawa: It is Essential to be There” is an exhibition put together almost exclusively off of Bawa’s archives and archival work; it provides an insight into Bawa’s mind that looking at his completed buildings or books on his work does not. So what of these other great architects and their archives?
First, it is important to note that archives are more than a collection of drawings and photos; sometimes they are environments – like the house of the artist Ena De Silva, which was methodically dismantled and reassembled in Lunuganga after the property on which the original house stood was sold. “Archiving is recording,” Channa Daswatte said. “It doesn’t mean drawings alone; it’s conversations, oral histories, recording buildings as they are.”
In a sense, as can be drawn from the name of this most recent Geffrey Bawa exhibition, part of archiving is being there, which is why it is essential to be there – to look, to understand, to record, to become part of that archive ourselves, and to carry it forward – to not lose valuable parts of our history to time.
