Renowned Myanmar architect U Bo Gyi, who designed the mausoleum for Daw Khin Kyi, the wife of independence hero General Aung San and the mother of detained State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, passed away of old age at 89 in Yangon on July 27.
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U Bo Gyi was pressured by the previous military regime to resign as a civil servant for designing the mausoleum. He joined the monkhood some 19 years ago and died as a monk.
As an assistant of Oswald Negla, a lecturer in architecture at Yangon University (then Rangoon University), he was involved in the construction of the university’s Recreation Center while still an architecture student at the university in 1959. He later won first prize in Myanmar’s first architectural competition, a contest to design the clinic of the Burmah Oil Company (BOC) in Yangon’s Thanlyin.
He was one of the founders of the Architects Incorporated Firm (AI), which became a leading architecture company in Myanmar. The AI was not just a thriving business, but a place for artists, sculptors, writers, musicians and entertainers to rendezvous and debate modern art, until military dictator General Ne Win seized power in 1962.
All businesses were nationalized at that time, and the AI was not spared. U Bo Gyi found himself an employee of the junta’s Housing and Public Works Ministry.
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After resigning as a government employee, he worked for a number of private architecture companies. He joined the monkhood in 2003, taking the monastic name U Pandita1.
U Bo Gyi also designed Independence Monument in Yangon, the City Hall and Square in Pyin Oo Lwin, the People’s Department Store in Yangon’s Pansodan (now Ruby Mart), and many government-run factories, public hospitals and private buildings.
- 1. “I am most satisfied with Daw Khin Kyi’s mausoleum, of all the architectural projects done in my life. The mausoleum was built by the Garrison Engineers of Myanmar [the engineers of the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military],” the monk said.
