Geoffrey Bawa: It Is Essential to Be There

Geoffrey Bawa: It Is Essential to Be There is the first major exhibition which draws from the archives to look at Bawa’s practice. Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa (1919–2003) inadvertently began his design career, while practising as a lawyer, with the purchase of an abandoned rubber and cinnamon estate, which he transformed into the garden that is now Lunuganga. From this first project in 1948, in the wake of the country’s newly gained independence from the British Empire, Bawa's work seeks to uncover multivalent notions of place. Organised in four thematic sections exploring relationships between ideas, drawings, buildings, and places, the exhibition explores the different ways in which images were used throughout Bawa’s five-decade career.

Geoffrey Bawa once described his approach as follows: “The site gives the most powerful push to a design along with the brief. Without seeing the site, I cannot work. It is essential to be there.” These words served as a point of departure for understanding Bawa’s attitudes to place-making through his archives. Over 120 documents are organised across four thematic sections, each exploring a different aspect of Bawa’s exploration of place: “Situating a Practice,” “Searching for a Way of Building,” “Defining New Directions,” and “Places Unbuilt.” Each section features a selection of his projects presented through drawings, photographs, and documents aiming to unpack the collaborative nature of the practice and the specific approaches taken to address each project as a unique place-making exercise. In addition to the archival material, the projects are presented through color photographs by Sebastian Posingis and Dominic Sansoni and short films by Clara Kraft Isono.

The Yale Architecture Gallery has been an important venue in bringing architecture and design exhibitions to an East Coast US audience; previous retrospectives of George Nelson, Eero Saarinen, François Dallegret, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and others have helped portray a range of architectural practices to audiences which include students and practitioners. 

Geoffrey Bawa: It is Essential to be There will be on view at Yale Architecture Gallery until November 30, 2024. The Yale Architecture Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm and Saturday, 10am to 5pm. Debuting in Colombo in 2022, at the Park Street Mews, the exhibition then went on to the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi in 2023. The exhibition is organized by the Geoffrey Bawa Trust and curated by Shayari de Silva. For more information, please visit bawaexhibition.com.

The Yale School of Architecture’s exhibition program is supported in part by the Robert A.M. Stern Fund, the Pickard Chilton Dean's Resource Fund, the Nitkin Family Dean's Discretionary Fund in Architecture, the Fred Koetter Exhibitions Fund, the Kibel Foundation Fund, and the James Wilder Green Dean's Resource Fund.