[extract] This paper is about buildings and people, specifically a par!cular type of built space in Sri Lanka known as tropical modernist, or just tropical architecture. The architect perhaps most associated with this style is the late Geoffrey Bawa, who is one of Sri Lanka’s best known architects interna!onally, modern or otherwise. His work will be familiar to many readers, but in order to set the scene for what follows I start this paper with a passage published two years ago in the English broad-sheet newspaper The Observer, in which Bawa’s Kandalama hotel [Figure 1] featured in their ‘Magnificent seven’ of modern hotel design icons around the world. The passage not only offers a sense of the sorts of architectural style and aesthe!cs that I engage with, but written by an obviously enthused, (probably) English travel journalist, it also points to an onlooker’s perspec!ve on some of the characteris!cs that are peculiar to, and are common across, this uniquely Sri Lankan architectural genre:

From the moment you arrive at the Kandalama hotel after a lurching drive through the jungle of central Sri Lanka, you know you are in an extraordinary place. The entrance is the mouth to a huge cavern set into the mountainside. The huge building is spread along the side of the rockface and covered by rich vegeta!on that con!nues to serve as the home for an astonishing variety of wildlife. The hotel was built in the early 1990s by the late Geoffrey Bawa, one of Asia’s foremost architects. His effort to blend the massive hotel into its environment, to use the contours, materials and vegeta!on of the stunning surroundings, succeeds triumphantly.

The passages linking the 160 plus rooms to the cavernous communal areas are open to the jungle, and at night guests share the space with bats, lizards, mongooses, huge moths, and fireflies.

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