The Genius of the Place: The Life and Work of Geoffrey Bawa, Sri Lanka's Premier Architect | movie | 2023 | Official Trailer
A groundbreaking documentary exploring the work of Geoffrey Bawa, Sri Lanka's most important architect, and how he decol | dG1fQkRSbDBKSE9STjg
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 (soft music)
00:02 - Pioneer, visionary, iconoclast.
00:07 Meet Sri Lanka's Jeffrey Bawa,
00:11 the greatest architect you've never heard of.
00:15 - I think Jeffrey Bawa was to Sri Lanka
00:19 what Frank Lloyd Wright was to America.
00:22 Luis Barragan was to Mexico.
00:29 - By focusing on five pivotal projects of Bawa's,
00:33 the genius of the place uncovers what drove
00:37 this seminal architect to come up
00:40 with his remarkable creations.
00:42 Blending his classically trained influences
00:49 with his deep love of nature,
00:50 conjuring buildings and gardens
00:55 that not only house the body,
00:56 (soft music)
00:59 but feed the soul.
01:01 With the Ina de Silva House in 1962,
01:08 he revived indigenous Sri Lankan traditions
01:11 in dazzling contemporary ways
01:13 and revolutionized a form that inspired the Asian continent.
01:18 - And suddenly they see Jeffrey Bawa's work
01:21 and it's like a sort of, like a wildfire, it takes off.
01:27 (soft music)
01:29 - With the Lighthouse Hotel near Gaul,
01:31 he was faced with the challenge of building a beach hotel
01:34 on a location where there was no beach,
01:37 in a part of the country where no one ever visited.
01:41 By taking a theatrical approach,
01:43 he turned the problem on its head
01:44 and found a way to design a landmark hotel
01:47 that became a destination for decades to come.
01:50 - And the amount of light that comes through it
01:52 at different colors of light,
01:54 I think that is his masterclass.
01:56 (soft music)
01:59 - With the Kundaluma Hotel
02:02 in the cultural triangle of the country,
02:04 he faced massive opposition from environmentalists
02:07 and local religious groups,
02:08 with one monk even threatening to set himself on fire.
02:11 Perhaps because of this,
02:14 Bawa went on to build the first LEED certified building
02:17 outside the United States
02:19 and one which blended into the jungle around it.
02:21 - He was a futurist in many ways.
02:25 - The last residential project Bawa ever created,
02:28 while in a wheelchair crippled with a stroke,
02:30 may have been his most audacious yet.
02:33 The house at Red Cliffs,
02:35 dispenses with doors and windows and even walls
02:38 to create a stunning pavilion
02:41 overlooking the Indian Ocean on three sides.
02:45 - I think people were quite amazed.
02:46 They couldn't quite understand
02:50 that something like this could have been done.
02:54 - And finally, Lunaganga,
02:56 which was his magnum opus,
02:59 the 15 acre derelict rubber plantation
03:02 that he purchased as his country estate in 1948.
03:05 And then spent 50 years nourishing and nurturing the gardens
03:10 as a labor of love,
03:12 creating multiple buildings around the property
03:15 to experiment with his ideas.
03:17 The genius of the place,
03:22 the life and work of Geoffrey Bawa,
03:24 Sri Lanka's premier architect.
03:28 (upbeat music)
03:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]