• Geoffrey Bawa House

Bawa's early works were houses that artfully married vernacular styles and responses to climate and site with a modern architectural vocabulary. Soon his talents were applied on a larger scale, to the Sri Lanka parliament, a number of carefully situated and designed hotels, schools, offices and other public buildings.

Geoffrey Bawa House

For our second installment of, in which we ask tastemakers, designers and entrepreneurs to tell us about the books that are inspiring them now, T talked to George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg of, the award-winning interior design firm behind the Lane Crawford home store in Hong Kong, the DB Bistro in Miami and the Smyth Hotel in TriBeCa, to name just a few of their most notable projects. Their pick, (Thames & Hudson) by David Robson, is a comprehensive record of the Sri Lankan architect’s modern-exotic oeuvre. Here, the designers discuss Bawa’s unique sensitivity to a building’s surroundings and intuitive understanding of what flows. A.We were introduced to Geoffrey Bawa’s work and some of his older books about 20 years ago by a Sri Lankan friend of ours. We bought this book at the bookstore on 57th Street.For how long have you owned it?Four years.What have you learned from it?Bawa takes the essence of what something is and puts that into his work, weaving architecture with interiors and landscapes. We love the tropical-modern movement — the design unfolds in such a natural, whimsical way.How are you interpreting its content into your own work?We’ve recently started branching out of the city, working on resorts and in more exotic places.

Bawa is the grandfather of tropical-modern design in Asia, which is interesting because the architecture in Sri Lanka is British colonial in style. He’s a true innovator in his field, and we are fascinated with the way that Bawa seamlessly merges exterior and interior architecture with its surrounding gardens.

He has such an astute eye for the local vernacular and for what flows.Now that we are working on several resorts, it would be amiss on our part to not go back to Bawa. We recently had the opportunity to see his work in Lunuganga, and we were amazed at how modern, current, and relevant it still is. Even for projects like one we’re doing on the Red Sea in Jordan, which isn’t tropical, we’ve looked to Bawa’s work – sensitivity to the building’s natural surroundings is paramount.Please summarize the book up in one sentence.An inspirational book based on Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa, who is ahead of his time especially since his initial formal training was in law school.Who would you give a copy of it to as a gift?Our designers and anyone considering designing a tropical-modern residence. It is still so relevant today in terms of environmental design.