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Valentine Gunasekara

Overview for Instructors

The work of Valentine Gunasekara (1931-2017) lends itself well to comparison with the work of modernists working in and inspired by Southern California’s desert landscape (e.g.Eero Saarinen, Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames), while also imprinted with the stamp of his training in the tropical modern tradition at the Architectural Association in London with, among others, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. His formal experimentations with concrete, and his enduring partnerships with engineers to exploit the structural potential of this new material, resonate with twentieth-century structural expressionist experiments in thin-shell concrete by designer-engineers in many parts of the world (e.g. Pier Luigi Nervi, Robert Maillart, Eladio Dieste, Felix Candela). Filtered through his religious and socioeconomic identities, his oeuvre also productively complicates discussions of the vernacular in tropical modernism. Gunasekara’s time abroad, not just in the United States but also in Nigeria, might be discussed in the company of new literature on South-South exchanges in the fields of architecture and urban planning. His work was received with ambivalence and much of it has since fallen into disrepair or been demolished, but a resurgence of interest in his approach in the last two decades has led to renewed scholarly evaluation of his work. Pieris’ book, Imagining Modernity, remains an invaluable resource for instructors seeking to include his thought-provoking examples of modern architecture from South Asia in their lectures, but as the bibliography below indicates, students of architecture will find his work a fertile ground for further critical and comparative study.

Bibliography

Pieris, Anoma. Imagining Modernity: The Architecture of Valentine Gunasekara. Pannipitiya: Stamford Lake, 2007.

____. “Modernism at the Margins of the Vernacular: Considering Valentine Gunasekara.”Grey Room (2007), 56-85.

____. Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser Under the Cloth. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013.

Rajapaksha, Anusha. “Valentine Gunasekara’s Search for a Just Social Fabric and New Architecture.” Journal of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects (December/February 1998/99, 101, n. 21), 13-24.

Case Studies for Class Discussion

1/ Models as a means for design thinking

  • Proposed house for Gananath and Ranjini Obeyesekere (1968). Imagining Modernity, 60-61.
  • Proposed Hotel for CDB Investments (1972). Imagining Modernity, 133.
  • Tangalle Bay Hotel (1969-1972). Imagining Modernity, 20-21, 25, 61, 114.

Gunasekara was awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965 and spent the following year first touring the offices of architects and designers including Louis Kahn, the Eameses, Richard Neutra, and Paul Rudolph, among others, and then working for six months for Kevin Roche in the offices of the late Eero Saarinen. He returned to Sri Lanka in 1967 equipped with new approaches to architectural practice, particularly the use of models to develop his designs, following the notable use of often-dramatic scale models by the Saarinen offices. This approach contrasted with the drawing-based design explorations predominant in Lankan practice at the time. Comparing images of the models that Gunasekara’s office produced with those created by the Saarinen office, and paying attention to when these images capture a hand, a laboring body, or even a child, what can we learn or imagine about the practice of architecture in its design stages? How do Gunasekara’s design methods compare with those of de Silva or Bawa?

2/ Between the ‘international’ and ‘vernacular’

  • House for S.N. and Lani Arseculeratne, Kandy (1967). Imagining Modernity, 59-60.
  • Proposed house for Gananath and Ranjini Obeyesekere (1968). Imagining Modernity, 60-61.
  • House for Sepala and SunethraIllangakoon, Colombo (1969). Imagining Modernity, 62-63, 66-67.
  • House for Namel and Malini Weeramuni (1972). Imagining Modernity, 68-70.

Gunasekara’s experiments with flat, terraced roofs are comparable with earlier work in both Europe (the roof garden was one of Le Corbusier’s ‘five points’) and the United States (although the work of desert modernists like Richard Neutra tended to be one-storey constructions) and contrast sharply with Geoffrey Bawa’s deliberately accentuated tiled roofs. How do design elements of Gunasekara’s residences—such as the central location of the kitchen and spaces for children in the Arsekuleratne house—illuminate the needs and desires of the emerging middle class in Sri Lanka at the time? Howmight Gunasekara’s “critical cosmopolitanism” (Pieris’ words, to describe a sensibility that diverged from critical regionalism) inform debates about place/placelessness in modern architecture, and complicate distinctions between international and vernacular styles?

3/ Collaborations in concrete

  • St. Martin de Porres Church, Horana (1963). Imagining Modernity, 104-109.
  • Samuel and Sons Pavilion, 1965 Industrial Exhibition (1965). Imagining Modernity, 30-35; “Modernism at the Margins.”
  • House for Sepala and SunethraIllangakoon, Colombo (1969). Imagining Modernity, 62-63, 66-67.
  • House for Namel and Malini Weeramuni (1972). Imagining Modernity, 68-70.

Gunasekara found creative expression in the new material of concrete; in his view, it promised to meaningfully address contemporaneous concerns of resource depletion and labor shortage while mediating between modernism’s formal aspirations and the longstanding building tradition of brick and mortar. (Unfortunately, Sri Lanka’s turn to import substitution following the global economic crisis of 1973 led to the curtailment of imports, including structural steel and cement so vital for concrete manufacture.) His flair for unusual form was reinforced by his professional relationships with architect Christopher de Saram who similarly relished the challenge of formal inventiveness, engineers A.N.S. Kulasinghe and Jayati Weerakoon who understood the structural properties of concrete, and village mason contractors—colloquially, “mason baas”—L.B. Siripala and Sirisoma who translated new designs into cost-effective realities. (Gunasekara’s view of the village masons as skilled contractor-foremen is significant in light of current labor issues in the construction industry in Sri Lanka on the one hand, as well as recent scholarship on the key role of the bòsmason in other locations.) How might we assess Gunasekara’s choice of building material, considering both the economic realities faced in Sri Lanka at the time and the kinds of professional collaborations he forged to carry out his visions?

4/ Modular housing

  • Model house at St. Joseph’s College, Colombo (1970). Imagining Modernity, 73, 76-77.
  • Modular house, Nigeria. Imagining Modernity, 23, 75, 78.

The first project might fruitfully be brought into conversation with other self-help and self-build development projects globally in the twentieth century, along with concerns of cost, modularity, ease of construction, social mobility, and location-appropriateness that they seek to address. Compare how Gunasekara interprets modularity here—of adobe construction within a single house, wherein rooms might be added on later as appropriate—with the modularity in California desert modernist housing, wherein a house is designed to be one of a series, made of prefabricated parts. Meanwhile, Gunasekara’s designs for houses in Nigeria, conceived at the same time as a design commissioned by the country’s vice president Alex Ekwueme—himself an architect—intended to be personalized through internal partitions by its inhabitants. These projects illuminate Gunasekara’s reinterpretation of the systemic design he was introduced to in the United States, while also informing discussions of South-South exchanges in new scholarship (e.g., Łukasz Stanek 2020, Duanfang Lu 2010). How do these projects inform scholarly work on the role of modern architecture in informing the discourse of international development?

5/ Religious expression

Gunasekara’s playful interpretation of a Sri Lankan vernacular religious style can be compared with the design of religious buildings produced on the eve of Sri Lanka’s (then Ceylon) independence from British colonial rule (e.g. the Trinity College Chapel, modeled closely on the King’s Audience Hall in Kandy). The structure of his 1960 Jesuit chapel is an unusual hall-like space with a vaulted ceiling built in reinforced concrete. Simple finishes echo Jesuit austerity: asymmetrically placed windows with translucent blue glass louvers, and a black cement floor. The undulating white structure might recall, equally, the Mediterranean lines of Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp or the undulating diyaralibemma (wave swell wall) surrounding the DaladaMaligawa, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, in Kandy. The St. Martin de Porres Church in Horana, similarly, strongly echoes Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s Our Lady of Fatima Church in Brasilia, or the kind of futuristic work dreamed up by Eero Saarinen, connecting it to a globally recognizable form of modernism, but the sweeping roof lightly comes down to rest on a few points on the ground to let the outside in just as with the Trinity College Chapel (and the King’s Audience Hall) in a dramatic interpretation of the Sri Lankan tradition of buildings as light pavilion-like shelters. These works legitimize the use of enduring natural forms that are near at hand as a local referent as much as past architectural designs. How do these works—as with Gunasekara’s entire oeuvre—invite us to critically evaluate ideas about the vernacular? Is it an image or a sensibility, a way of visualizing form or a way of experiencing space?