| buy book | BEYOND BAWA: MODERN MASTERWORKS OF MONSOON ASIA By David Robson. London: Thames & Hudson. 2007 This book, a sequel to David Robson’s 2004 publication Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works, is in three parts. The first retraces some of the ground covered in the earlier book and throws new light on the influence on Bawa of his talented elder brother Bevis, who designed the extraordinary garden at Brief, and the Australian artist Donald Friend. The second part of the book studies the work of Bawa’s former colleagues in Colombo and their subsequent work as independent practitioners. This section includes work by Anura Ratnavibushana, C. Anjalendran, Sumangala Jayatillaka, Murad Ismail, Channa Daswatte and the artist Laki Senanayake. Robson weaves a fine tale of influences, connections, interpretations and opportunities offered and how his close associates sustained the Bawa legacy. In the third part, Robson credits my own publications with playing a significant role in bringing Bawa’s genius to a wider audience in South-East Asia. It was pure serendipity that in 1986 I encountered Bawa’s work on Sri Lanka’s south-west coast. I was immediately captivated by its sensitivity and beauty and I was enthused to write of the experience. A European, I was struck by the elegance of the work, by the sheer genius in connecting spaces, but most of all by the ambiguous edge between the interior and exterior – the ‘in-between space’. The experience of the completed works was also conveyed through drawings that had a tactile sensuous quality that I had never previously encountered. These were drawings not only to convey information to the builder but were also retrospective productions to show the relationship between a building and the landscape. My ‘discovery’ of Bawa’s architecture greatly influenced my teaching at the National University of Singapore in the 1980s and ’90s. Thus, as a long-time admirer of Bawa’s work I need no convincing of the value of Robson’s book. It is a wonderfully informed account of an influential architect who was warm, gentle and solicitous yet with a touch of ruthless dedication that all great architects require to achieve their aims. Robson is to be credited with almost single-handedly recording and disseminating the influence of Bawa to an international audience. He writes in an engaging manner backed by sound scholarship, yet the book ends somewhat abruptly – the influence of Bawa in South-East Asia surely goes beyond the works of Kerry Hill, Ernesto Bedmar, Mok Wei Wei, Cheong Yew Kuan, Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell that are lavishly illustrated. It can be detected in the work of others such as the Malaysian architects Wooi Lok Kuang and Kevin Low and the landscape architect Ng Sek San, who all acknowledge a debt to the Sri Lankan master. And in the work of other Singapore architects including Tan Hock Beng, Lim Cheng Kooi and Yip Yuen Hong there is further evidence of Bawa’s influence. And perhaps too in the work of Mattar Bunnag and Bill Bensley in Thailand and Jaya Ibrahim in Indonesia. For David Robson this book concludes a personal odyssey, yet I sense there may be another book in the making that would complete a trilogy on the lasting legacy of a truly important Asian architect. ROBERT POWELL |