Architect, Sri Lanka Geoffrey Bawa is a rare architect whose work combines an environmentally appropriate beauty with a cultural sensitivity. Bawa was educated within the modernist tradition in the West, where he was trained both as a lawyer and as an architect. An urbane, widely read, and well-traveled person, he remains rooted in the soil of his native land. His buildings are predicated on the landscape and climate—he is as much an architect of landscape as he is of buildings. To Bawa, the pitched roof is the archetype of southern Asian architecture. It is the dominant element that governs his aesthetic, in which shape, texture, and proportion are the strongest visual factors in his buildings. The great roof, with the building’s sides open to the flow of air and the view, give “presence to both function and form, to admit beauty and pleasure as well as purpose” (as told to the author, 1984). Another important feature of his work deals with movement through the building, modulated by ...