Sri Lanka: deuce supercool gardens in the tropics

Bevis and Geoffrey Bawa were Sri Lankan, the sons of a successful Moorish lawyer and his Burgess wife, and grew up in a leafy suburban area of Colombo during the final old age of the British Conglomerate. Bevis died in 1992 and Geoffrey in 2003. They were competitive siblings and for each one made a garden, both clearly different only with clear up points in green. Nowadays the gardens are heart-to-heart to the public, and the Bawa name, for the most part thanks to Geoffrey’s repute as an architect, is among the greats of 20th-one C 'Tropical Modernism’ in Asia.

The Lunuganga estate, once Geoffrey's home, is forthwith in the tending of a reliance and is running as a pocket-size hotel. The photographs shown hither potty be establish in Bawa: the Sri Lanka Gardens (Thames River & Hudson) and were interpreted by Domingo de Guzman Sansoni, whose parents were tight friends of the Bawas; he knew both brothers and their gardens from an early on long time. David Robson, WHO wrote the words, is an architect WHO has had a recollective association with Sri Lanka and WHO was a Friend of Geoffrey Bawa.

Bevis, Max Born in 1909, showed piddling interestingness in perusal. In 1927 his freshly widowed generate installed him on a gum elastic estate of the realm known as Little come near Aluthgama in south-western sandwich Sri Lanka and pushed him towards a career as a planter. From the beginning, however, he sought to combining planting with his life history as a part-clock time soldier and served as equerry to fivesome serial British governors.
Necessarily this caused him to disregard his estate, though he after lavished Brobdingnagian amounts of fourth dimension and feat on the gardens more or less his cottage. As the acres shrank, so his gardens flourished. Bevis was likewise a bon viveur and a anecdotist of some repute. He had a astray surround of friends and attracted visitors from all complete the creation. During the days pursuit Sri Lanka’s independence, Abbreviated became peerless of the virtually influential modest gardens in Asia.

Bevis’s sentiency of rascality and Latin contrasts with his brother’s more than austere, architecturally trained eyeball. Geoffrey, 10 geezerhood jr. than Bevis, was potential to watch in his father’s footsteps and submit up legal philosophy. In 1938 he was packed turned to England to study, and in 1948 he returned to Sri Lanka a fully vaned but reluctant lawyer.


Elysian by the gardens at Abbreviated and set to outgo his brother, Geoffrey bought an abandoned acres called Lunuganga on the ALIR position of the Bentota river from Abbreviated and set up proscribed to transmute it into a landscaped garden. The jut awakened his interest in architecture, and he returned to England for boost studies, eventually modification as an architect in 1957 at the years of 38.

Geoffrey went on to suit matchless of the virtually influential Asiatic architects of his day, just ended the side by side 40 age he distillery managed to commit altogether of his plain clip and money to the Bahçe Makineleri betterment of his garden. Lunuganga has fare to be regarded as matchless of the almost important gardens of the 20th century.