This first chapter of Part II (on tropical modern architecture) introduces Sri Lanka's tropical modern architectural style and the kinds of environmental experience it aims to afford users. By engaging a body of work on architecture drawn from cultural geography and critical architectural studies, the chapter advances a strategy for re-reading this modernist architecture and its environmental resonances in ways that tease out its ethnicizing effects in the Sri Lankan context. The chapter focuses specifically on two architects key to this post-war modernist movement, Geoffrey Bawa and Minnette de Silva, and it explores how their work aesthetically and ornamentally territorializes the same kinds of sacred modern aesthetic domains drawn through Part I of the book. The chapter contextualizes the architecture, whilst drawing connections between its environmental resonances and those delineated in Part I. It suggests that we reconsider it as not benign ‘art for art's sake’ but as a form of architectural production that is also heavily implicated in forms of banal nationalism.

Sacred Modernity argues how everyday non-secular experiences of the natural world in Sri Lanka perpetuate ethno-religious identitarian narratives. It demonstrates the relationships between spaces of nature and environment and an ongoing aesthetic and spatial constitution of power and the political in which Theravada Buddhism is centrally implicated. To do this, the book works consecutively through two in-depth case studies, both of which are prominent sites through which Sri Lankan nature and environment are commodified: first, the country's most famous national park, Ruhuna (Yala), and second, its post-1950s modernist environmental architecture, 'tropical modernism'. By engaging these sites, the book reveals how commonplace historical understandings as well as commonplace material negotiations of the seductions of Sri Lankan nature are never far from the continued production of a post-independent national identity marked ethnically as Sinhalese and religiously as Buddhist. In the Sri Lankan context this minoritizes Tamil, Muslim and Christian non-Sinhala difference in the nation-state's natural, environmental and historical order of things. To make this argument, the book writes against the grain of Eurocentric social scientific understandings of the concepts 'nature' and 'religion'. It argues that these concepts and their implicit binary mobilizations of nature/culture and the sacred/secular respectively, struggle to make visible the pervasive ways that Buddhism - thought instead as a 'structure of feeling' or aesthetics - simultaneously naturalizes and ethnicizes the fabric of the national in contemporary Sri Lanka. Sacred Modernity shows the care and postcolonial methodological sensitivity required to understand how 'nature' and 'religion' might be thought through non-EuroAmerican field contexts, especially those in South Asia.