Takes a look at Geoffrey Bawa's life and career and at the legacy of his influence through the work of contemporary architects working across southeast Asia.

One of the most influential names in Sri Lankan architecture,Geoffrey Bawa is represented here through images of his houses,hotels, public buildings, and the famous complex at Lunuganga Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa was among the most influential figures in South Asia in the latter half of the twentieth century. In houses, hotels, public buildings, and perhaps his greatest achievement, his residential complex in Lunuganga, Bawa achieved the harmonious and pleasurable fusion of local building traditions with modern forms. His legacy lives on in current architectural practice and remains an important source of inspiration for generations of architects. Bawa was the principal force behind what is today known globally as “tropical modernism,” and examples of his ideas can be found in Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Bali, and in resorts and residences throughout wider Asia.The book first presents a useful overview of Bawa and his contribution to contemporary architecture. The main section highlights the achievements of twenty-four contemporary architects, ranging from well-known practitioners such as Australian Kerry Hill to local talents such as Sri Lankan Anjalendran. The works they have created over the past ten years reveal the long-lasting significance of Bawa’s approach to building and the landscape.

This book explores how the concept of ‘region’ has evolved over time and shaped architectural culture and practice. It questions what the words ‘region’ and ‘regional’ mean for architecture, cities and landscapes past and present, and speculates on the forms they might take in the future. Region is explored in many thematic guises: as a real geographical site of evolving socio-economic activity; as a mythical locus of enduring value; as a gatekeeper of indigenous crafts and vernacular techniques; as a site of architectural and artistic imagination; as a repository of contested, conflicted and mobile identities. The contributing chapters take these themes from the theoretical and literary page through to architectural and urban practice, and from the scale of the domestic hearth through to the ocean archipelago and international law, enriching the long-standing trope of viewing architectural regionalism purely as a matter of style. Curated into four key thematic areas – Theorised Regions, Contested Regions, Heritage Regions and Future Regions – the book incorporates the values, concerns and approaches of a truly diverse international community of scholars, curators and practitioners, as well as the design work of international students tasked to explore what region means to them.

Address by the speaker at International Centre for Ethnic Studies.

Sacred Modernity tours the natural places of Sri Lanka in order to examine the relationship between nature and religion that some Sinhalese Buddhists have developed there. Working through case studies of Sri Lanka's most prominent national park, Ruhuna, and its post-1950s modernist architecture—known as tropical modernism—Tariq Jazeel reveals the ways Sinhalese Buddhists have interwoven their negotiation of nature with their continued production of a post-colonial identity. He shows how this production minoritizes Tamil, Muslim, and Christian non-Sinhala in the nation's natural, environmental, and historical order. A sophisticated study of the complexities that lie between nature and culture, Sacred Modernity also demonstrates a social science that works beyond Eurocentric conceptions, offering new contexts for postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and geography.

The role of the home, the domestic sphere and the intimate, ethno-cultural identities that are cultivated within it, are critical to understanding the polemical constructions of country and city; tradition and modernity; and regionalism and cosmopolitanism. The home is fundamental to ideas of the homeland that give nationalism its imaginative form and its political trajectory. This book explores positions that are vital to ideas of national belonging through the history of colonial, bourgeois self-fashioning and post colonial identity construction in Sri Lanka. The country remains central to related architectural discourses due to its emergence as a critical site for regional architecture, post-independence. Suggesting patterns of indigenous accommodation and resistance that are expressed through built form, the book argues that the nation grows as an extension of an indigenous private sphere, ostensibly uncontaminated by colonial influences, domesticating institutions and appropriating rural geographies in the pursuit of its hegemonic ideals. This ambitious, comprehensive, wide-ranging book presents an abundance of new and original material and many imaginative insights into the history of architecture and nationalism from the mid nineteenth century to the present day.