The exhibition will explore relationships between ideas, drawings, buildings and places, and the different ways in which images were used in Bawa’s work. More than 120 documents from the Bawa archives will be displayed, including a section on unbuilt work and the architect’s photographs from his travels, the statement added.
The exhibition was first presented in Colombo during February-April 2022. The Geoffrey Bawa Trust received financial support from Kohler India for the exhibition in New Delhi.
Though Bawa’s work has been exhibited at many venues in India, Sri Lanka, the UK, the US, Australia, Brazil, Singapore and Germany, this is the first exhibition to focus on the architect’s archives
and the first retrospective exhibition of his work internationally since 2004.
Bawa came to architecture late, qualifying at the age of 38 in 1957, but soon established a reputation as an inventive architect through his prototypes for buildings in a post-independence context. His work includes hotels, houses, schools, universities, factories, offices, public buildings and the new Sri Lankan Parliament.
One of Bawa’s most impressive achievements was the garden at Lunuganga, which he fashioned from an abandoned rubber estate over a period of 50 years. Two years before he died in 2003, Bawa received the special chairman’s award in the eighth cycle of the Aga Khan award for architecture.
