Unearthing what underlies elite domestic works of Geoffrey Bawa and Valentine Gunasekara

Abstract

In the ambivalent postcolonial decades, marred with tension and ethnic strife, reverting to once subverted indigenous traditions with the patronage of elites, was explicitly pursued by nascent architects of Sri Lanka. The most celebrated domestic architectural rubrics of the nation’s post-colonial period could be characterized as seemingly vernacular-biased Modern Regional Architecture for the Tropics (MRAT) of Geoffrey Bawa. Its antithesis version of Architectural Modernism dwelling on innovative technology and expressionism was followed by Valentine Gunasekara. Each of these rubrics has been defended by academic polemics over the years, labeling them as the most apposite and valid to the contexts of their appearance, and hence to the nation as a whole. In this backdrop, the paper attempts to explore underlying factors behind architectures of the two masters, and the reasons for the apparent success of the latter over the former. The discussion commences with an induction to the worldwide system of elitism, and addresses its relevance to the postcolonial context of Sri Lanka, promulgating the needs of the newly independent nation. The following advent to Sri Lanka’s postcolonial architectural rubrics explores the state of ambivalence of the period, finally leading the way to investigation of factors behind two mainstream domestic architectural approaches of the time.