Memory, modernity and history: the landscapes of Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka, 1948–1998

Abstract

This paper discusses the landscape garden of Lunuganga, Sri Lanka, designed by the architect Geoffrey Bawa for himself after 1948. It assesses this space as a site of memory and a location where modernity and history are negotiated. The present paper theorizes the making of Lunuganga in relation to the production of modernity in Sri Lanka and negotiation of the island's relationship to colonial and pre-colonial histories. The island of Sri Lanka has a long history of the development of cultural landscapes. Bawa's landscapes can be located within these traditions. Furthermore, the time he spent in Europe furnished him with an understanding of the picturesque landscape tradition. Lunuganga could be described as a site where these (colonial) histories and vernacular traditions re-staged or re-presented the modern in contemporary Sri Lanka. Bawa's landscapes can also be ‘read’ as ‘sites of memory’, where, although of the modern era, the past is recalled. The landscape of Lunuganga references negotiations between adoption of a universal modern, with its taint of colonial subjugation, the neglect of this troubled past and the pursuit of an uncomplex indigenism and, in so doing, intervenes in the production of modernity in Sri Lanka.