CHAPI'ER TWEL VE

David Robson

In 1949,soonafterSriLankahadgainedits independence, a young man startedto make a garden. For its set ting hechose an abandoned rubber estatestraddling two low bills on a promon-tory which juts out into the DedduwaLake, a sleepy backwater of the BentotaRiver. A mile away to the west thewaves of the lndian Ocean roll in overthe coral reef and break on to a whitesandy beach fringed wi th coconut palms.To the east beyond the serried ranks ofrubber-clad bills and rice-carpettedvalleys, lies the mysterious Sinharaja,Sri Lanka ' s only remaining area of pri-

meval raiD forest. This is the wettestregion of Sri Lanka and its most fertile,a vast hothouse ,of exotic trees and

plants.Today the garden is in its prime, but,

after the passage of more than fortymonsoons, Sri Lanka has lost its inno-cence and the young man has grownold. As he sits on a terrace above therice paddy and surveys his handiworkhe reflectson theinevitabilty ofwhathehas produced: perhaps the garden hadsimply been waiting there to be discov-ered beneath its canopy of jungle. Butthis is a work of art, Dot of nature: it isthe contrivance of one mind and a hun-dred pairs ofhands working with natureto produce something which is, supranatural ' .Forests have been felled

and new trees planted, hills have been

moved and terraces cut. The originalestate bungalow has been turned insideout, and the hill has been liberalysprinkled with pavilions, walls andstatues.

The garden is called 'Lunuganga.' ,which in Sinhala means 'salt river' .Inits previous incarnations it had been aDutch cinnamon plantation and a Brit-ish rubber estate and, like many of SriLanka's landscapes, it is a man-madecreation. But Dow it has taken on a lifeof its own: it is a living organism,changing with the weather, with thetime of day, ':Vith the seasons, with thepassing of the years.

The man who has been bothLunuganga' s creator and guardian iscalled Geoffery Bawa. He was born in1919 in what was then the British Colonyof Ceylon and grew up in that tolerant,cultured and cosmpolitan society whichonce thrived on the shady verandahs ofColombo's leafy suburbs.

Bawa belongs to a generation of art-ists whose lives spanned across theindependence divide, among them thepainters George Keyt and Manjusri, thedancers Chitrasena and Vajira, thede-signers Ena de Silva and BarbaraSansoni, and the architect Minette deSilva. Born into an open and pluralisticsociety they came together from everycorner of Sri Lanka' s ethnic maze, and,inspired by a growing appreciation of

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David Robson

the diversity and depth of their ownhistory and culture, they worked at theirart to discover ways of making anddoing things wbich would be both newand vital and yet at the same time essen-tially Sri Lankan.

As a young man Bawa studied Eng-lish and Law at Cambridge in the late1930s and was called to the Bar inLondon in 1943. Maving spent sometime travelling in Europe and Americahe returned home just as Sri Lankaregained its independence.

ln 1949 when he bought Lunugangabis aim was to turn the estate bungalowinto a weekend house, and to createaround it a tropical evocation of thegreat renaissance gardens of Europe.This ambitious project awakened hisinterest in architecture but he soonrealised that his knowledge was nomatch for his imagination and hereturned to Britain to study at theArchitectural Association School inLondon.

When he finally qualified as an,ar-chitect in 1956 he was already 37 yearsold. After travelling in Europe he re-tumed to Colombo in 1958 and becameprincipal partner in the near moribundarchitectural practice of Edwards, Reidand Begg. Since then Geoffrey Bawahas been astonishingly prolific. Misportfolio of work has encompassed re-

ligious, social, cultural, educational,governmental, commercial and resi-dential buildings, and he has estab-lished a comprehensive range of proto-types in each of these areas.

It is difficult to suffi up or evaluatethe work of an artist who, though closeto the end ofhis career, is still active asa designer and builder. But we can saywith some certainty of Geoffrey JBawathat he has exerted a decisive influenceon the emerging architecture of the

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newly independent Sri Lanka and thatbis buildings and ide as have been takenas exemplars by a whole generation ofyoung Sri Lankan architects.

His architecture is a subtle blend ofmodem and traditional, of east and west,of formal and picturesque: he exploitsthe climate and the fertility ofhis nativeland in order to break down the artifi-cial separation of inside from outside;he draws on every twist and tum ofhiscountry , s colourful history to create an

architecture which is fit ting to its place,but he also scours the world for ideas toinform an architecture which is of itstime.

Two projects probably hold the keyto an understanding of Bawa's work:the garden at Bentota which he hascontinued to fashion for over 40 yearsand his own house in Colombo. Bothhave been many years in the making,both have served as test beds for histheories and ideas, both take an existingcontext as their starting point. The twoact as complementary opposites: thetown house is a haven of peace lockedaway within the busy city , an infiliitegarden of the mind constructed like aRubic Cube on a tiny urban plot; thegarden at Bentota, in contrast, in a dis-tant retreat, an outpost on the edge tothe known world, which challenges theinfinite horizon of the ocean to the westand the endless switchback of hills tothe east and which reduces this vastopen landscape to a controlled series ofoutdoorrooms, acivilised garden withinthe larger garden wildemess of SriLanka.

Bawa's house in Colombo is an es-say in architectural bricollage. ln 1958he bought the third of four small bunga-lows which lay along a short cul de sacat the end of a narrow suburban lane andconverted it into a pied-a-terre with

living room, bedroom, tiny kitcben androorn for a servant. When the fourthbouse became vacant it was convertedto serve as a dining roorn and secondliving room. Finally in 1968 tbe firsttwo bouses of the row were bougbt andadded into the compositon. At this stagethe f1fSt bouse was dernolisbed andreplaced by a 4 storey structure incor-porating a ground floor flat for visitors,a first floor library, a second floor gar-den terrace, and a third floor roof ter-race. The result is an introspective laby-rinth of rooms and garden courts wbicbtogether create the illusion of infinitespace on wbat is a tiny urban plot.Words like inside and outside lose alImeanihg: bere are rooms witbout roofs,and roofs without walls, all of thernconnectd by a matrix of intemal vistas.

Althougb tbe final plan is the resultof a process of accretion whicb basexploited all sorts of visual accidents,there is also a strong sense of structuredcomposition. The visitor is drawn inalong the long entrance corridor by apool of ligbt framed by two columnsand then tums onto a cross axis wbicb isagain terminated by a small open court,before finally meeting the main longi-tudinal axis which runs frorn the princi-plebedroorn to the furthermost gardencourt.

It the main body of the bouse is anevocation of a lost world of verandahsand courtyards assembled frorn a ricbpalette of traditional materials andplundered artifacts; the new pavilion isnothing less than a reworking of leCorbusier' s Maisom Citroban, a skilfulmanipulation of interpenetrating vol-umes created by plain abstract surfaces,rising vertically to an upper roof terracewbicb gives view'~ across the neigb-bouring treetops and roofs towards thesea.Here is proofthat old and new can

exist as complementary parts of the

same whole: the low horizontals of the

traditional pitch-roofed bungalow are

enhanced by the three dimensional

gymnastics of the cubist pavilion.

The Colombo house offers a COD-

trasting prelude to the experience of the

Bentota garden and together they ex-

emplify Palladios's advice to the

burghers of Vicenza in hisFour Books

of Architecturel:

A city house is certainly of great

splendour and conveniency to a gentle-

man who is to reside there aIl the time

he shaU require for directing his own

a.lfairs. But perhaps he wiU not reap

much less utility from a country house..

where the remaining part of the time

will be passed in the art of agriculture.

improving his estate. and where the

mind. fatigued by the agitations of the

city. will be great I y restored and com-

fortéd. Hence it was the ancient sages

commonly used to retire to such like

places.. where being oftentimes visited

by theirvirtuousfriends. having houses.

gardens. fountains and such pleasant

places. they could easily attain to as

much happiness as can be attained here

below.

ln the beginning there was an undis-

tinguished estate bungalow sitting on

the top of a low hill within in its 25 acres

of rubber and enjoying only restricted

views out northwards across the

DedduwaLake. Since that time a new vista has been

opened up southwards across the lower

half of the Dedduwa Lake towards a

distant Buddhist temple. This has been

achieved by cutting a broad swathe

through the rubber trees and removing

a large section of the neighbouring hill.

At the same time the old estate road

which ran in the dip between the two

hills to serve a neighbouring property

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David Robson

has been hidden within a ha-ha. Theview from the southern entrance ter-race is now contained by carefullyshaped side fringes of trees and is framediathe middle distance by a moonamaltree and a large urn which mark thesummitofCinnamonHill. Theeyerunsdown and up through a cone of spaceand leaps out from Cinn~on Hill to-wards the temple and the sky.

The bungalow itself still survives,though it is now cocooned, in amannerreminiscent of the famousMaduwanwela Walauwwa, within acollection of new appendages: veran-dahs, porches, rooms, court yards, out-houses. The area beyond the kitchensand servants quarters to the east andsouth of the house, has been trans-formed into a series of interconnectedoutdoor rooms, the Eastern Tenacesformed by the guest house, the gardenroom and the sculpture gallery .To thewest of the house an open lawn leads toa series of shady tenaces which dropdown into the 'Field of Jars', a valleywhich opens out northwards to the edgeof the lake.

To the north, the wide band of marshygro'und which separates the north sideof the hill from the edge of the lake hasbeen formed into a water meadow anddivided into a checker board of ricepaddy squares. Between water meadowand hill the 'BroadWalk' runsfrom thepavilion at the eastern boundary of thegarden, across the lily ponds, along thebase of the hill and across the end of thePlain of Jars creating the one obviouslyformal element of the composition. Thenorth face of the hill has been ci.Jt backto form arocky cliff alongwhich threadsthe 'Middle walk', a shady promenadeconnected by stone staircases upwardstowards the main lawns and downwardstowards the Broad Walk.

126

AIl of this has been achieved on apiece of land which measures barely500 mettes across the peninsula fromedge of lake to edge of lake, and 300mettes from east to west along the BroadWa1k. The liinits of this gardencan beinspected bya brisk walker within fif-teen ininutes, though a complete explo-ration of every corner might take a day,and anyone who one wanted to experi-ence its varying moods would be betteradvised to set aside the whole of aweek.

Over the years the original rubberttees have been replaced progressivelyby a wide variety of more ttaditionalplants. But this is a civilised wilder-ness, not a garden of flowers andfountains. It is a composition in mono-chrome, green on green, an ever chang-ing play oflight and shade, a successionofhidden surprises and stunning vistas,a landscape of memories and ideas.

Hereis no orgy oftopiary and bric abrac with trees cut to statues, statuesthick as trees2. Works of art are care-fuIlyplaced toform objects forcontem-plation, punctuation marks on routes,pointers or distance beacons. A leopardlies in the dappled shade beside thelake, a young boy stands on the edge ofthe garden terrace, pointing out the viewto those above, beckoning to thosebe-low, a grotesque PaQ grins up from theedge of the paddy.

The various pavilions and terraceswhich have been constructed down theyears appear now simply to have grownout of the ground. The carefuIly re-stored remnants of some earlier periodof occupation. Today Lunuganga canbe read as a palimpsest, a manu scriptupon which a whole series of messageshave been superimposed.

A garden is not a static objeçt: it is amoving spectacle changing with the

David Robson

climb up a short flight of steps to thefirst terrace. On the right the guest wingbridges over the pavement which linksthrough to the Eastern Terraces, whileahead a welcoming loggia indicates thebroad flight of steps which carry usupwards and tum us on to the southterrace of the main house.

Nothing thus far has prepared us forthe astonishing view of the CinnamonHill and the distant temple which sud-denly confionts us as we pause beforeentering through the main door of thehouse. It is as if, in a game of BlindMan's Buff, we've been spun aroundand around and suddenly the blindfoldhas been removed: aIl our senses areconfused and we've been transportedto the very centre of a magic world.

Entering the house from the southterrace we cross via a long passage tothe main sitting room and out into aspacious loggia where a magnificenttemple tree frames a new vista, openingout towards the lake and the island.Lawns runnorth and west to the edge ofthe hill from where there are viewsdown on to the Field of Jars and thewater meadows.

The house lies at the hub of thecomposition, andanditis theonly pointfrom which aIl of the individual partscan be comprehended. From its ter-races we can set out in any directionand assemble the various elements ofthe garden into an infinite number ofdifferent spatial sequences. We canexplore the Eastern Terrace with itsstudio and sculpture gallery and thenmove back westwards along the Mid-dle Walk, lingering for a while in thestone pavilion before dropping down.the Field of Jars. We can climb theCinnamon Hill and descend to the edgeof the southem part of the lake, retum-iilg via the water tower through the

time of day, the season, the mood, thepoint of view. And so Lunuganga basbeen conceived as a series of separatecontained spaces, to be moved throughatleisure, orto be occupied at particulartimes.

The voyage of discovery really be-gins on the doorstep of the bouse atBagatelle Road in Colombo whencethe car sets out on its harrowing fort ymile journey along the busy coast roadwhich leads to Galle. At the 38th milepost we reach the town of Alutgamaand cross the estuarY of the BentotaRiver on a long low bridge. On our rightthe Bentota Beach Hotel, the first of SriLarika' s new tourist hotels, and still itsbest by far, reminds us that we areentering Bawaland.

At Bentota we turn inland and, aftera couple of miles, reach a narrow causewily which crosses the DedduwaLake. Here on the right we catch ourfust glimpse of the northern terracesof Lunuganga on the oppositeshore.This chance encounter is reminiscentof Kent's device at Stowe, wherethe visitor first views the south front ofthe bouse in the distance across thelake, but is then taken aroundthrough the trees to arrive, totally con-fused, at the main entrance on the northside.

And so it is at Lunuganga: we disap-pear back into the trees and must hego-tiate two more junctions before findinga narrow track which leadsacross a ricepaddy towards a thickly wooded hill.Here the main route seems to draw thevisitor straight ahead, but this wayleads to the sunken ha-ha: only the mostobservant will spot the real drivewayd~ng away up the hill to the right.Two more steep turns and the car ar-rives at a gravel platfonn undera densecan.opy of trees. From the car park we

128 ~

David R~~- : c", -~--~==c~ ~-

been inspired by the great gardens ofEurope, and particularly by Englishgardens such as Stourhead and Stowe,but it is stiIl fresh and vital while theyare now nothing more than the fossil-ised remains of something which oncewas great. It is stiIl what they oncewere: a private place for private enjoy-ment, a place for contemplation, a placefor gatherings of friends. Above alI elseit is a very beautiful and moving workof art and nature.

Today the garden seems to be sonatural, so established, that it is hard toappreciate just how much effort hasgone into its creation. Vast quantities ofearth have been moved, fuIly growntrees and shmbs have been imported,branches have been carefuIly weigheddown with stones to train them: nothingexists now which has not either con-sciously been allowed to remainin place,or been introduced deliberately into thecomposition. And the project 'is notcomplete:hardly a year has passed since1949 without some new element beingadded, some new area being colonised.

Nor is it immediately apparent justhow much maintenance work is needed.Ignore the garden for a week and thepaths and staircases wiIl clog up withleaves, ignore it for a month and thelawns wiIl mn wild, ignore it for a yearand the terraces wiIl start to cmmble;after two or three years the jungle willretum and after five years the gardenwiIl be lost for ever. But this process ofmaintenance is not something me-chanical which can be given out to 'l'

sub-contractors or organised by a com- ~,

mit tee in Colombo. It requires the con- }.stant vigilance of a creative eye, of the ,~-eye of the man who has made it. ~

Now, when Geoffrey Bawa sits on iiw~,

his terrace at Lunuganga and watches 1~

the sun go down across the Dedduwa ;t

trees to the Field of Jars. We cao dropdown from the Eastern Tenaces to thelily ponds and sit for a while in theBlack Pavilion before promenadingalong the Broad walk beside the waterMeadows to end up sitting besi,de thesleepy leopard at the Water Gate. Or wecan throw caution to the winds and headoff westwards beyond the Cadju TreeTenace to explore those parts of thepeninsula which have yet to be colo-nised.

Conceptually the garden at Bentotaprobably owes more to the great gar-dens of renaissance Italy and 18th cen-tury England than it does to the Mogulgardens of India, and yet it uses theseEuropean models to create an essen-tially Asian experience. Again and againwe are reminded ofPope' s advice to theyoung Lord Burlington:Tobuild, toplant, whateveryou intend,To rear the Column, or the Arch to

bend,To swell the Terrace, or to sink the

Grot,In aIl, let Nature never be forgot.But treat the Goddess like a modest

fair,Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly

bare,Let not each beauty ev'ry where be

spy'd,There half the skill is decently to hide.He gains aIl points, who pleasingly

confounds,Surprises, varies, and conceals the

Bounds.It is tempting to see Bawa as a sort of

latter day Burlington, and Lunugangaas his Chiswick Villa. Here he has heldcourt, drawing together a circle ofpainters, designers, and architects andplot ting with them to write a new chap-ter in the history of Sinhalese art andarchitecture. The garden may weIl have

"130 '- ~ i'f;-

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David R.00s0n

Lake, he may ask himself what will

become of this magic world which has

taken a lifetime to create. Ought it to be

frozen and preserved, a national monu-ment maintained by a commission ofbureaucrats, to be trampled over by

thousands of souvenir hunting tourists?Might it perhaps be tumed into a study

centre and allowed slowly to ,developand change under the watchful eyes of

a succession of guardians? It wouldcertainly be better to allow it quickly to

be swallowed up by jungle than to see it

turned into a travesty of its former self.

References

I. Andrea Palladio, The four JJ{}ob of Archil"clu..e

Isaac Ware Edition, 1738.

2. Alexander Pope. tpislle 10 wrd Burlinglon

Collected Poems. Penguin 19-'1.

Bibliography

Michae) Brawne. Ce.y/on --7 New Buildjl1gs Archi-

tecturaI Review. Aprij )966.

Mjchael Brawne. .The Work of Geoffrey Ba~.a ..The

Architectural Review. Apri) )978.

Brain Bruce Tay)or, Geoffrey Bawa Mjmar 1986.

Geoffrey Bawa. C'hristoph Bon & Dominic Sansonj.

..Lunuganga". Times Editions, Singapore,

)990-

;?],i!J

I1 "

.

1,Fig. I. The soit patch ol/awn surrounded by rneandering herbaceou.\" border.\". serpentine

paths running round an island bed and a pretty .fountain spilling into a lily pond. a

sma/l galebo. and even a tiny grolto shrouded in ivy, are \"orne ofthejeutures of this

enchanting Victorian garden.

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