Overview for Instructors
Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, was a British colony until 1948. In fact, Sri Lanka had been under partial colonial rule since 1597, first by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and then the British, resulting in an amalgam of architectural and other cultural influences. Before Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948, the civic buildings that signaled power to the denizens of capital city Colombo included the National Museum (1877), Town Hall (1928), and the old Parliament building (1930). They embodied a particular kind of distance: Sri Lanka was a peripheral entity subject to a European metropole, and to architectural forms that originated under very different social, political and even climatic conditions. These (still extant) buildings were constructed by British architects, many of whom were civil servants in the Public Works Department (PWD) at the time. A strong wave of resistance to this embodiment of spatial power emerged not just in Sri Lanka but also other decolonizing nations across the world in the 1950s and 1960s, but what was this architecture to be replaced with? This section discusses this transitional period, and introduces two architects: Justin Samarasekara, a local architect originally in the PWD who worked to establish the island’s first professional architecture program, and Andrew Boyd, a British tea taster-turned-architect who built the first modernist works on the island. This section is intended to provide background details and context that allows the subsequent units on Minnette de Silva, Geoffrey Bawa, and Valentine Gunasekara to be taught in comparison with other contemporary movements.
Bibliography
Anjalendran, C. “The Architectural Contribution of Dr. Justin Samarasekara,” SLA Journal, vol. 101, no. 19 (1997), 19-23. http://dl.nsf.ac.lk/bitstream/handle/1/8453/SLA-101(19)-19.pdf?sequence=2
Bingham, Percy M. History of the Public Works Department, Ceylon, 1796 to 1913. Colombo: H.R. Cottle, 1921.
Campbell, J M. A Sinhalese Chapel for Trinity College, Kandy. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Trinity College Printers’ Club, 1926.
Lewcock, Ronald B, Barbara Sansoni, Laki Senanayake, and C Anjalendran. The Architecture of an Island: The Living Legacy of Sri Lanka. Colombo: Barefoot (Pvt) Ltd, 1998.
Perera, Nihal. Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998.
_____. “Indigenising the Colonial City: Late 19th-century Colombo and its Landscape,” Urban Studies vol. 39, no. 9 (2002).
Pieris, Anoma. Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser Under the Cloth. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013.
Robson, David. “Andrew Boyd and Minnette de Silva, Two Pioneers of Modernism in Ceylon.” Thinkmatter, April 2015. https://thinkmatter.in/2015/03/04/andrew-boyd-and-minnette-de-silva-two-pioneers-of-modernism-in-ceylon/(section on Andrew Boyd)
Case Studies for Class Discussion
1/ Floating roofs as a national style
- Peradeniya Teacher Training College (1920)
- Trinity College Chapel (1935)
- Independence Memorial Hall (1953)
These three examples of transitional “national” architecture are based on the Royal Audience Hall built in the 18th century in Kandy. The Kandyan Convention, which brought the entirety of Sri Lanka under British rule, was signed here, and a replica was built in 1948 in Colombo to commemorate the independence of Sri Lanka from British rule with the restoration of full governing responsibility. These early forms are more imitations than interpretations of an older form, betraying an earnestness to encapsulate a Sri Lankan-ness that was in fact not yet fully formed and embodying a particular form of dislocation: the building “site” was interpreted as the national arena, and a Sri Lankan architecture would have to be co-produced with the idea of Sri Lanka itself. (For more on these buildings, see Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka, 109-118).
This so-called national form and turn to indigenization is also complicated by the fact that many transitional buildings of this type were designed by British architects.The Independence Memorial, for instance, was built by a Public Works Department team led by architect Neville Wynne-Jones. The PWD in British colonies often developed an “engineering vernacular” visible in both administrative and domestic buildings. In Sri Lanka, military engineers constructed most buildings until the establishment of the PWD in 1867. The main challenge for designers in a new nation was how to continue or subvert traditions of received knowledge, so the path to professionalizing design practices previously embedded in vernacular traditions and guilds is significant.One of the team members, Justin Samarasekara (1916-2003), was a graduate of the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (“J.J.”) School of Art in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1943. (Another member was Oliver Weerasinghe, the island’s first town planner, who is also credited with catalyzing Minnette de Silva’s interest in architecture when he lent her some magazines on the subject when she was young.)He joined the PWD in 1946 and became its chief architect in 1956. A founding member of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects, he worked to establish the nation’s first program in architectural studies at the University of Moratuwa.(For more on Samarasekara, see Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka, 149-150). Considering these buildings and others like it from this period as precedents for the work of de Silva, Bawa, and Gunasekara, how do the three architects refine, reinterpret, or resist the floating roof as national style? In doing so, how do they mediate between modernity and indigenous tradition, the national, and the international?
2/ Breaking ground on modernism
- Mrs. Pieris houses (1938). See “Andrew Boyd”.
- Harold and Leah Pieris villa (1939). See “Andrew Boyd”.
In his book on the Public Works Department, Bingham describes the first use of concrete in the island. But at first, builders did not take advantage of the unique structural properties of this new material (i.e., concrete made with Portland cement, which was developed in the nineteenth century), using it simply to mimic forms made with materials like brick. The first modernist to truly experiment with the properties of concrete was Andrew Boyd (1905-1962). He arrived in the island as a tea taster for Liptons, and a burgeoning friendship with photographer Lionel Wendt led to a serious interest in architecture. Upon completing his studies at the Architectural Association, he spent two years in Sri Lanka (then still Ceylon), producing a photographic study of traditional architecture and later taking on commissioned work that was overtly functionalist, drawing on the capacity of concrete for sinuosity, and incorporating many familiar modernist elements including sun shading and cross-ventilation. Again, it is instructive to consider how de Silva, Bawa, and Gunasekara refined the use of concrete, reinterpreted functionality for a local context, and resisted the placelessness of high modernism in their work.
