Mr Bawa, I Presume

‘I start to shoot while the world is still asleep; I thus manage to capture the buildings within a suspended dimension,’ architect Giovanna Silva has said. ‘They look abandoned, were it not for the traces left by man the day before.’ For architect and educator Luca Galofaro, this creates ‘a “dirty” architectural photography, apparently motionless yet dotted with objects that offer testimonies of the secret life of architecture.’

Galofaro writes that Silva’s books are designed to be read like interpretive atlases. In this publication, while his foreword and Silva’s introduction provide some context, the only obvious organising principle is the marginal notes that name and date each project. Those aside, it is sea of imagery describing a journey. Its rawness lays bare the master architect’s works; context coexists with detail, vignettes intrigue, shifting composition leaves the eye as restive as that of the photographer.

Silva’s text is both personal travelogue and historical commentary, providing some insight into the story behind this obsessive sojourn to document as much of Bawa’s Sri Lankan work as possible. As Galofaro notes, appropriately for the progenitor of Tropical Modernism, ‘no detail takes pre-eminence over another, as architecture and nature dance hand in hand, both outside and in.’