In recent decades, Western scholars and a publishing culture oriented towards Western audiences have increasingly evaluated cultivated architectural practices in South and Southeast Asia within a ‘regional or critical regional,’ ‘tropical modern’ or ‘vernacular’ design framework based on references to traditional building systems and their picturesque reinterpretation in space and form (Lai and Pieris 2011). This framing, which imposes a borrowed design paradigm on a different and complex set of social concerns (Frampton 1980; Tzonis and Lefaivre 2003) is largely provoked by a Western rejection of postmodernism and search for contextual modernist alternatives outside the West. While useful for focusing on certain cultural and climatic attributes in architecture, they often ignore the broader socio-economic, socio-cultural and socio-technical frameworks of the local building production process. Sri Lanka is one of the countries where this type of cultural alignment has been most evident, with many of the architectural elements and spatial solutions found in traditional dwellings, temples and historical remains – particularly roofs, verandas, internal courtyards and decorated building components – are borrowed and reconceptualised for modern architectural use, especially in high-end residential construction and high-end tourism. This coincides with the state domination of public architecture and subsequent professional estrangement from the state-led infrastructure projects, social housing and a range of industrial and institutional buildings, which are under-examined, while experimentation in such programmes is under-valued. Indeed the architecture that is recognised as representative of the nation seems to be ignorant of its most pressing social concerns.

Since the 1960s, and also thanks to publications such as Mimar and The Architect1 as well as monographs on individual architectural practices, an ostensibly critical approach to Sri Lanka’s building heritage has grown to represent the country’s architectural identity and refined canon, as epitomised in the design of the new Parliamentary complex in the 1980s by Geoffrey Bawa – whose work has been identified (through international publications and awards) as exemplifying the regionalist approach. Although Bawa did not claim this label for his architecture, his work has been used by Western scholars to illustrate concepts and discourses that originated in the West and were inserted and circulated in the Asian region (O’Coill and Watt 2008). Increasingly, through the dissemination of regional publications, awards and public lectures, such ideas are being circulated and validated within the profession, and used to advance the work of the other local architects (See, Cooper 2011; Wijetunge 2010).