Wednesday

It’s midnight and I have a 9 o’clock session tomorrow morning and I should be getting some sleep. But first there is so much to tell you about today.

The BAWA AND BEYOND architecture tour was scheduled to set off at 8:15am. So I had an early morning walk down Pedlar Street and Lighthouse Street and Church Street. I watched a vegetable seller on his bike stopping at to sell bananas and sarana and gossip with the mistress of each house he passed. I saw sari-ed schoolteachers rushing in pairs to a school that was already chirping with unbroken voices.

This was followed by a wonderful tour led by Channa Daswatte of houses and temples and small hotels between Galle and Tangalle. We were given access to the home of the Bishop of Galle (built in part by the uncompromisingly modernist Valentine Gunasekera) and talked through the Victorian murals of the Kataluwa temple (where each wall is painted by a different family of artists). More often than not we were greeted – in true Sri Lankan style – with food and drink. We had kirala juice at Kurulubedde, orange squash and a large chocolate cake at the Bishop’s house, and glasses of cold water at Amanwella. At Geoffrey Bawa’s ‘Last House’ we stopped for passionfruit juice and hansi putu (chaises longues) and a delicious rice and curry lunch. At the end of the day we waded out to Taprobane Island through (a low) high tide. But Channa’s commentary was the best bit – mixing architectural insights with architect’s anecdotes and pointing out stories that lay along the roadside.

Did you know, for example, that

Geoffrey Bawa came to think the roof the most important part of any building in monsoon Asia?

It was the Southern School of mural painting in Sri Lanka that brought the everyday (the latest lamps and fabrics and ways of life) into the depiction of religious folklore?

The plane bringing news to Sri Lanka of Japanese attack during the Second World War itself crashed off the coast of Koggala (and the pilot had to swim ashore with the news)?

Bawa had the foundations of the Ruhuna campus buildings moved after they had been laid down in too regular and rectangular a way?

There has long been a temple to Vishnu at Devinuwara (‘city of the gods’), the southernmost point of the Indian Subcontinent, that looks straight out to the Antarctic?