Early work in Tropical Modernism

Bawa's early work included office buildings, factories and schools and was influenced by the 'Tropical Modernism’ of Fry and Drew and ultimately by the work of le Corbusier.  Typical of projects from this period are the remote Strathspey Tea Estate Bungalow at the foot of Adam’s Peak, and the classroom extension for Bishop’s College in Colombo.

In the classroom block for Bishops College the interiors were protected by perforated external wall panels which were supported on a concrete portal frame and inserted between the exposed beam-ends to give an impression of extreme lightness and delicacy.   A heavy horizontal eaves beam was hung out to protect the facade and to mask the pitched roof, thus accentuating the horizontality and modernist credentials of the design.

For more than a century Sri Lankan domestic architecture had been heavily influence by British taste.The typical British 'bungalow' was a pavilion on one or two floors, cellular in plan, extrovert in concept and located at the centre of a large garden plot.  However the population of Sri Lanka was exploding and Colombo was rapidly evolving from leafy Garden City into modern Asian metropolis.   As land prices rose so plot sizes shrank and the British bungalow could no longer guarantee privacy or provide adequate ventilation.

In his first houses built at the end of the 1950s, such as that for Carmen Gunesekera (1958) Bawa deconstructed the colonial bungalow and rearranged its constituent parts in such a way as to create semi-enclosed spaces. A second series of 'frame houses', designed with Plesner and inspired perhaps by Scandinavian models, used a concrete frame to support covered terraces, garden courts and planted roof gardens and was typified by the houses built for Upali Wijewardene (1959) and Aelian Kanangara (1959).