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Following on
Romantic Gardens,
we went in search of a house where nature, garden, and
architecture merged into something wondrous, and found Lunuganga
(such strange poetry even in the name, which literally means
salt river in Sinhalese).
Geoffrey Bawa
(1919-2003) the famous Anglo-Asian architect was the leading light
of the school of Tropical Modernism. He was born in Sri
Lanka and studied law at Cambridge, but tired quickly of actually
practicing in Ceylon and returned to London to study architecture
at the AA. In 1948, Bawa acquired Lunuganga, a rubber
plantation of 25 acres with, what was then, an unremarkable
bungalow. House and garden then evolved together over some
30 years, the gardens some strange blend of Italian Renaissance
and local aesthetics with touches of Modernism. But also,
architecture and landscaping that are responsive to nature, site,
the tropical seasons.
Michael
Ondaatje, the writer, author of The English Patient, and
also of Sri Lankan heritage, says of Bawa:
“But I think
that if we wish to see a self-portrait of Geoffrey Bawa we will
find it most clearly in his own garden and home in Lunuganga.
Lunuganga is in every way a life work, and the garden there a
clock wound around mortality....You discover you wish to be at one
location at noon, another at twilight, some when you are young,
others that you will appreciate later in life. It is a
complex and also a subtle place, so subtle that there is the
famous story about the visiting guest who said, looking over the
landscape, 'but Mr. Bawa – wouldn’t this be a lovely place to turn
into a garden?' It was, said Geoffrey Bawa, the best
compliment he ever got.”
It’s a house
where architecture and garden merge and there is always the
romanticism of the knowledge that this estate is on that beautiful
island which hangs like an earring off the cheek of India.
Bawa added verandas, courtyards, galleries, and loggias to the
original house, and reshaped the land, hills, and terraces, and in
many ways Lunuganga is essentially a tropical Romantic garden, and
is all about a changing sequence of vistas: Cinnamon Hill, the
lake, a Buddhist dagoba, terraces, pavilions, lily ponds, a
sculpture court –-a 'civilized wilderness.' All this
encompassing an early understanding of sustainability and the use
of natural vegetation. Lunuganga is now run by the Lunuganga Trust as a hotel and the gardens are
open to the public.
Stay:
Lunuganga
Read:
Running in
the Family, Michael Ondaatje's luminous memoir of growing up in
Sri Lanka
Explore:
Geoffrey
Bawa, online
Read:
Geoffrey
Bawa, The Complete Works, David Robson
Tags:
literature travel design
architecture
books
gardens
Romantic
Sri Lanka
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