Geoffrey Bawa is Sri Lanka's 'Tropical Modernist' top architect. I know little about architecture and had never heard of him before I knew I was coming to Sri Lanka, but reading my Rough Guide I was struck by a sentence in his boxed mini-biography:
"Bawa often and famously designed buildings to fit around existing trees, for example, rather than just cutting them down."
"Bawa often and famously designed buildings to fit around existing trees, for example, rather than just cutting them down."
Geoffrey Bawa's House
This immediately won my approval and piqued my interest and while I am yet to see this in Bawa's work I have noticed the incorporation of trees within buildings quite a lot around Colombo; both in plush hotels and also in more lowly contexts such as this example:
