Architect Geoffrey Bawa was a ‘visual lyricist’ | THE WORLD OF INTERIORS

Recently, I found myself immersed in the gallerist Niru Ratnam’s beautifully wrought paean to his aesthetic forebear Geoffrey Bawa, and, perhaps, his own immigrant parents and a specific time and place. Swiftly, in my head at least, I stepped into his hired tuk-tuk, tottering about the end of the world.Ratnam has been on the trail of the aforementioned architect for most of his life, and for the August 2023 issue of WoI – swept up, perhaps, by the spirit of a place he was yanked away from as a two-year-old – visited Number 11, his home in Colombo, capital of both men’s native country and scene of so much strife between 1983 and 2009. ‘Perhaps,’ he ruminates, ‘it’s unfair to expect Bawa to have commented much on the civil war – most Sri Lankans did not, and artistic responses to it only really started to take shape in its aftermath.’ About the architect’s sanctuary, he concludes: ‘It is more fruitful to think about Number 11 as an alternative vision of the nation to the turbulent realities of those years.’

Source: Architect Geoffrey Bawa was a ‘visual lyricist’ | THE WORLD OF INTERIORS