October 24, 2024 • 57 mins
Afdel Aziz (The Conspiracy of Love) discusses his groundbreaking documentary ‘The Genius of the Place'.
This extraordinarily beautiful film introduces us to Geoffery Bawa and his architecture in Sri Lanka.
Bawa (1919 – 2003), recognised as one of the influential architects of the twentieth century, devoted his work to the discovery of a contemporary Sri Lankan sense of place.
Afdel’s interview reveals the importance of the film as a story of Bawa’s life and work within the utterly beautiful Sri Lankan geography.
Afdel enchanted his film with special interviews among the talented Sri Lankan architects, artists, and craftspeople with whom Bawa collaborated, to bring forward his formative expression of a de-colonised Sri Lankan architecture.
This extraordinarily beautiful film introduces us to Geoffery Bawa and his architecture in Sri Lanka.
Bawa (1919 – 2003), recognised as one of the influential architects of the twentieth century, devoted his work to the discovery of a contemporary Sri Lankan sense of place.
Afdel’s interview reveals the importance of the film as a story of Bawa’s life and work within the utterly beautiful Sri Lankan geography.
Afdel enchanted his film with special interviews among the talented Sri Lankan architects, artists, and craftspeople with whom Bawa collaborated, to bring forward his formative expression of a de-colonised Sri Lankan architecture.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
This is Rosalind Darby here from Local Architecture now for
September twenty four and we have Aftel Aziz who were
interviewing high.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
After on Hi. Rosalind, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Thank you so much. This all started back in I
think May, when I viewed along with my other professional
colleagues here in New Zealand. Are Tiro your extraordinary documentary
movie a genius of place the life and work of
Jeffrey Bauer.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yes, thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yes, so, Aftil, would you like to introduce yourself? You
are currently here as a result of your documentary and
from Sri Lanka. How does that connect? Was how I've
got to meet you today online?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, Well, my journey starts in Sri Lanka. I was
born there, I grew up there in the seventies and eighties.
I then moved to London to study and then subsequently
lived and worked in London and New York now Los
Angeles where I'm coming to you from. And I have
an entirely separate life as a filmmaker working in the
field of brand management of corporate strategy. I have a
(01:30):
company called Conspiracy of Love where we help large companies
like Adi Das and Sephora the Gap find ways to
make money by doing good. But all through my life,
I've been fascinated by storytelling. I wrote books of poetry.
When I was younger, I wrote a novel, and my
(01:52):
dream was always to make a film, and I thought
a documentary film would be a great place to start.
And when I was searching for a topic that would
obsess me to go through the arduous process of making
a film, I realized I had to find something that
I'd be passionate about telling a story about. And the
(02:13):
answer was right in front of me. It was in
my beloved country of Sri Lanka, and it was about
the work of an architect that I had grown up with,
Jeffrey Bauer, but who I realized the world knew very
little of. And so it became this quest to show
people the work of Jeffrey Baba and explain to the
(02:35):
world why he is such a legendary architect and deserves
to be celebrated alongside architects like Oscar Nemaiah in Brazil,
Lewis Barragan in Mexico, or even Frank Lloyd Wright in
the United States. And so this turned into this, this
two and a half year quest to write, research and
shoot what is now the genius of the place, the
(02:58):
life and work of Jeffrey Bauer.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So a two and a half and for the research
as well. You could see in the film the joy
and the love and the absolute awareness of what architecture
is and how you could communicate it to us as professionals.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
That yeah, thank you, yeah that you know you can't
see it. But behind me, on this bookshelf there is
a stack of coffee table books about Baba that's about
twelve inches high. And so I realized his work had
been photographed in two D plenty of times, but he
designed buildings to be moved through. You know, he literally says,
(03:44):
you know, a building must be experienced, you know, you
can't just look at it. And that's when I realized
that I could use film to immerse people in what
it was like to move through a Bauer building, and
not just move through by using drones. Move over a
bou Our building, and look at how the terrain influences
(04:07):
the buildings. And so the three words I kept repeating
to my team were make it epic, make it cinematic,
and make it immersive and really teleport the viewer into
what it was like to experience a Boer building.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
So it's interesting to hear that is your kind of
intention and aspiration, because when I was in that movie,
it was immersive. It was all of those things that
you talk about. And I could see at the end
people are getting up at the end of the credits
walking and I, I just I was transfixed. I had
to know how it had been made, who was there,
(04:46):
and I didn't want to leave my seat. I was
actually I was, you know, almost at that tearful point
because I was so moved by it and the exposure
of country and geography and landscape, which is so important
to all of us. As I can texts you obviously,
that was your brief to your team, and I think,
(05:06):
I guess maybe marketing and branding can help our profession
in that way as to how to communicate the soul
of a place.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah, I have to confess I didn't even know about
Jeffrey Bamer and I you know, I'm pretty well read
in architecture, so it just shows as you say, over
there in Tri Lanka, and I didn't know about Sri Lanka.
I mean immediately I want to now want to go
to Sri Lanka, and I'm very envious because my colleague
is going in about a month. And I googled it.
(05:36):
I googled the pathways where the nearest hostel was in
the capitol, which is what is the capital of Columbia.
I was just walking through on Google all of that
up down that river. And so that's what that movie
did to me. I'm actually almost a bit embarrassed by
my you know, whether my New Zealand draw accent can
match the beautiful tones of the voices in that movie.
(05:58):
It was a voice kind of thing as well. Well.
Obviously I don't know if you're friends of the architects
that you interviewed and the cross people you interviewed, but
it was the spoken word as well as the visual
and of course the architecture and the history of the
man himself, Jeffrey Bauer.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, well, thank you for saying that, you know, so
to give you some context, I'd been thinking about this
project for a long time, and I realized that we
were in danger of losing the oral history of Jeffrey
Bauer from the people who knew him and collaborated with him,
(06:35):
and in fact in the movie, there's three of his
I would say his greatest collaborators, you know De Silva
like you said, and Nika and Barbara SINSONI together, I
call them like the four Musketeers of Sri Lankan architecture
and design. They were close friends and amazing collaborators, and
the initial version of the film, I wanted to go
(06:56):
and interview them, and unfortunately, because of old age, they
started passing away. And so I had this moment in
the middle of COVID when I was sitting there, going
I need to get my skates on and find people
who knew him and talk to him and had a
personal recollection of him. Because it was as much a
(07:18):
portrait of the man himself as his buildings. You know,
the journey was to find five buildings which sum up
an architect's work, and when you think about Bauer, you know,
doing one hundred and seventeen buildings, that's quite a tall order.
But moreover, it was to talk to his collaborators who
worked with him on those buildings to see how they
(07:40):
revealed the man himself. And so I was very lucky
to find people like China. That's what the and morat
Ismael who were two of his closest collaborators and friends
who worked with him on many of the projects, who
were kind enough to sit down with me and talk
about their recollections of him. Snila Jiahua Dinner, who is
(08:01):
an incredible female architect in Sri Lanka, probably the best
architect working there for my money, in terms of her
environmental designs. She is a dear friend of mine and
I'm close friends with her daughters, and she was kind
enough to let me sit down and interview her. And
so it was like this kind of detective journey to
go through and meet people, including his clients by the way,
(08:25):
so Hieran Corey who was a chairman of Jetwing Hotels
with the Lighthouse Hotel, and another people who had actually
commissioned mister Bauer, and through their recollections, piece together this
portrait of this fascinating eccentric man and have him tell
their stories, tell history in their own words.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Well they did very much. So, I mean you could
hear the beautiful cinematography and of course the work and
the country in the landscape, but these voices coming through,
I think she said a few minutes ago, your your
your work is storytelling you just mentioned that as a phrase,
and I can now see how how absolutely important that
(09:10):
was to the quality of the movie that you engage
these storytellers. I mean, who was the architect, the first one,
the man with the ponytailer you just mentioned his name, Yes, well,
I ended up googling him and looking at all his
work and his lectures that as well. And first of all,
I hear in his voice, and I just assumed it
was an elderly woman's voice, a very gentle woman. And
(09:31):
then this man's face appeared with this ponytail and and
I just it's the sort of the gentility of the
whole thing was also so enjoyable sound, visual and landscape.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Thank you for saying that. Well, I'll talk a little
bit about how I approached this as a storytelling exercise, right,
And that's where I realized, you know, it's the classic
hero's journey that you would you find in literature all
around the world. You know, how does this person embark
on a journey to transform themselves, what are the obstacles
(10:08):
they face, and how do they emerge on the other
side of it? And so if you look at the
five buildings, they're actually chosen to represent five moments of
conflict in Bauer's life when he had came up against
the challenge. The first of them is the enner To
Silver House, which is this stunning courtyard house built in
the sixties. And the challenge at that time was that
(10:32):
Sri Lanka had no access to building materials like concrete
and steel and glass, all of these things that the
you know, modernist movement were using because of import restrictions.
And that's what led him to go back to using
you know, tile and stone and brick and all these
things that were readily available in villages and drawn as
(10:56):
knowledge of indigenous culture, to take the the kind of
elements of classical indigenous architecture in Sri Lanka, having sloping roofs,
high ceilings, internal courtyards, and come up with a twentieth
century version of a house that was so impactful that,
(11:18):
as I show in the film, and it was in
danger of being demolished. There was a six year project
to deconstruct and reconstruct that house. And so that's almost
like chapter one, you know, problem number one. And then
each of the different properties have different issues. In the Lighthouse,
(11:38):
how do you build a beach hotel on the place
there is no beach in the Counder lumber jungle. How
do you build something where there is uproar from environmentalists
and create something that became the first LEAD certified building
outside of America. Each time it was about how bower
(11:59):
the me and rose to the challenge with determination and
innovation and just you know, this kind of as they
call it, a stainless steel backbone. He had and persevered,
you know. And so that's where at the end of
his life, I think that's why you see him having
(12:19):
the incredible jubilation of seeing his work come to life
in the way that he wanted to. And time is
now on his side and he is vindicated in terms
of all of these incredible ideas he had and how
they came to pass.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
And you say that he had various conflicts. Of course,
he was actually a classic Modernist, wasn't he Before he
before he really embarked on the Silver House. I mean
he he was skilled. He could he could do the
modernist mid century, the urban urban work. But his right
(13:00):
awareness and understanding of architecture, particularly from a local cultural
point of view, was to move, as you said, and
the first work was the Silver h.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
He you know, he's really interesting because he had a
you know, he came to architecture in his forties. He
was a lawyer before this, and he had traveled extensively
around the world, and he'd done things like the Grand
Tour in Europe and seen ancient civilizations around the world.
So he had a deep well of understanding of architecture
for millenniua. He is obsessed with ruins and looking at
(13:33):
ruins and thinking about things as future ruins. And so
when he started his practice, yes it was in the
modernist style, and yes, some of his early work falls
into the category of what people call tropical modernism. But
then he very quickly went off at a tangent. You know,
he's almost like a musician who starts off playing classical music,
(13:55):
and he starts playing jazz, and then he starts playing
all these other kinds of music. And with each project,
his muse is actually the location, hence the title of
the film. His starting point was the genius of each place.
And then just like a jazz musician would take a
(14:16):
note and then riff on it, keep riffing on it
until it turned into a tune. That's what he'd do
with a location. He'd sit there sometimes for two or
three days, chain smoking cigarettes. Back in those days before
he even put pen to paper and starts sketching things,
observing like observing shadow. And so each creation never replicates
(14:39):
what came before, because each creation is almost like a
bespoke suit that he is creating for that place. And
so that's where the cliche is that, oh, he was
a tropical Modernist. Yeah, there's some of his buildings that
were tropical Modernists in style, but he went so much
deeper and wider and you know, beyond in throughout his
(15:00):
entire career. And that's what I wanted to show in
this documentary.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah, oh thank you. In fact, that the documentary the
name exploring this idea of place that's almost like a
current contemporary that were as architecture and designers are talking
about now, I mean way back. The is to talk
about it genius loci when I was training, but it's now,
(15:25):
but now it's that word, But now we're talking about
place in terms of urban design and things, and it's
only just becoming kind of current in people's vocabulary. So
that movie, even though you're talking about an architecture was
practicing in the fifties, I think in the sixties and seventies.
In a way, you're his understanding of place way back
(15:47):
then shows how contemporary his thinking was, because we're now
starting to talk about that as our understanding. You know,
we work from the point of the geography, from the
point of the place. How do people relate, how do
they gain their r stincts of identity by the place
that they're in, and how buildings conduit there. So the
movie is very, very very about now.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yeah, in so many ways he was ahead of his time,
you know. So that attention to having a dialogue with
the location first, as opposed to coming in with a
predetermined set of styles or signatures that they were just
plunk down, I think is something all architects need to
(16:32):
reacquaint themselves with his respect for indigenous building traditions and saying, actually,
there's a reason houses in for example, in the tropics
should be built with these common set of characteristics as
opposed to just adopting a British bungalow style of housing
(16:53):
with you know, tiny windows, you know flat roofs, and
you know slow ceilings which work great for a cold
winter in Surrey but are terrible for art tropical climate.
And reinstilling a sense of pride in our indigenous traditions
(17:13):
is another huge trend we're seeing with incredible indigenous architects
around the world. And then the sustainability of building things
which actually didn't require that much energy that made use
of breezes, that use nature as a in a what
would now be called kind of you know, biophiliac way.
(17:35):
The Kunderlima Hotel is a perfect example where he designed
it so that in fifteen years time, nature would overgrow
the hotel and it would blend in and become part
of the natural ecosystem. These are all incredible ideas to
explore now as we think about sustainability, as we think
about our relationship with the natural world, as we think
(17:56):
about our mental health and how we need nature in
our lives. That's where there's so much in his work
that I deserve, I think deserves to be lifted up again.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yes, absolutely, and that's what you did as meeting that
you always wanted to produce a movie, and what a
wonderful I mean, yes, I really do want to hit
tell the audience to look on the Shelter channel and
view this movie because it is Yeah, it's very timely.
(18:29):
It crosses so many avenues of the conversations we're having
at the moment, as you say, about place and sustainability
and connecting and understanding how nature through buildings as important
for our well being.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Thank you. Yeah, you can find it on the Shelter
Architectural Channel. It's streaming globally right now and please check
it out. And more to your point, I want to
go back to another reason I did the film, which
was I want people to get on a plane and
go to Sri Lanka, you know, like I hope you're
going to do. When we started shooting the film, Sri
(19:07):
Lanka was actually going through this massive economic crisis which
happened a couple of years ago. Thankfully it's all over
now and the tourism industry is picking back up. But
for a moment, tourism, which was one of Sri Lanka's
biggest revenue drivers, dried up completely and the narrative was
really bad. And so I was able to go with
(19:30):
a bunch of incredible Sri Lankan filmmakers, pretty much everybody
who worked on that film with Sri Lankan's together with
a couple of fantastic collaborators from Los Angeles, Paul Vu
and Hayden Blas who came on this journey with me,
and our common purpose in making the film was not
only to tell the story of this incredible architect, but
(19:51):
to show people the incredible beauty of Sri Lanka and
make them fall in love with it on screen and say,
I want to go and stay in these places. By
the way, you can go and stay in all of
these five places that are in the film as well.
So if that leads to more people going and experiencing
the country, that would be that would make us immensely happy.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
There are massive built up areas in Tree Lanker, I'm
sure there are, but the amount of jungle of jungle,
of sort of canopy, tree canopy, and those wetlands and
those lakes you know, reaching into the distance in your
footage shot from above, it was very immersive. And it's
(20:35):
a country. I mean, I don't know if you know
much about a tira on New Zealand, but we pride
ourselves on our indigenous bush coverage, our physical mountains or
rivers to the sea. So I felt the affinity that
the way that you created the respect and kind of
connection with the land in that movie and how buildings
(20:57):
actually informed that as well communicate that to people who
are living there. It really connected was the aspirations we
have for our own country.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Yeah, I mean I've been to New Zealand. I love it.
I think it's an incredible country that has spiritual beauty
and there's very few places on the planet that have it.
I believe New Zealand has it, and I believe Sri
Lanka has it. And so part of the brief again
was to expose people to not only the physical beauty
(21:32):
of the country, but to connect with that magic of
why it's something that moves you on a deeper spiritual level.
And that's where the wonderful drone photography from passindu the
are incredible. I call him an aerial cinematographer because to
call him a drone island, which just too little, was
(21:53):
gain changing. You know, to show the country from the air,
to show the beaches, the mountains, the jungles, the ancient cities,
and reveal the country from the air, and then show
how Baber so carefully mapped his buildings to the terrain
in you know, in sympathy with the terrain, to reveal paintings,
(22:19):
if you look through his windows. Every window is a
frame of a painting, looking at the ocean, looking at
the mountains, looking at the jungles. That bought a whole
other dimension. Again, I think to architectural filmmaking, because again,
if you're only ever seeing a building on a coffee
table book in two dimensions, you're missing ninety percent of
(22:44):
the spectacularness of the building. And in fact, I'm now
developing a series of movies called Moving Architecture, where I
hope to go and shoot other legendary architects and their
work in the same way, you know, using four K
cameras move through the buildings and then using eight K
drones to shoot the buildings from above and immerse people
(23:08):
in the wonder of these buildings as well, so that
I help you spend more time shooting incredible buildings. And
if anybody has any suggestions as to architects whose work
they think I should look at, happy to take suggestions, okay.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
And if I could say that it's a filmmaker and
not an architect, you're providing that service of commuting, communicating
to the wider public what architecture is, why, what it
actually is. In terms of that it's respectful place. It's
(23:41):
respectful landscape and grounding the user, the visitor, the resident,
the person in the street took place. That is why
we do what we do, and so that the movie
and what possibly upcoming movies they it's a tool for
us that you're telling, you're conveying. We're so busy doing it.
(24:05):
It's very hard often for us to communicate the importance
of building and architecture in that way that it actually
connects people to geography.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yeah, thank you for saying that. And I know I
was hugely influenced by a wonderful channel called The Local Project,
which features incredible houses in Australia and New Zealand. Please
check that out. I watch tons of it. They do
a fantastic job of simply letting a person experience a space.
I think that's maybe the barrier. Sometimes architecture can be
(24:42):
quite dense and arcane in the terminology and can be
quite intimidating to people who may not understand the jargon
or who might feel a little bit put off by
the language, Whereas if you strip away the language and
just show them the visuals the experience, everybody can get
(25:02):
it without needing to think about oh does it fall
into this school of architecture or how would I don't
have the language to explain what this architect was thinking theoretically,
you know, and Baber puts it in. That's the quote
at the beginning of the film. Baber himself said, architecture
cannot be explained, it must just be experienced. And that
(25:23):
was our starting point. Let us just show you what
it's like to experience these buildings as Baber would have
wanted you to.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Mm hmmm, exactly. Thank you for that. There's so much
to talk about, going into the colonialism as part of
the story as well, and how he elevated your culture
through his through architecture, and and Bauer himself, do you
(25:51):
want to just explain a bit more about.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
His Yeah, so, you know, he's just a human being.
He's so fascinating. His background, his cultural background is almost
a perfect combination of all the different races and cultures
that make Sri Lanka home. He was part Dutch, part Muslim,
part Eurasian. He came from a very privileged background and
(26:20):
had a chance to go and study at Cambridge and
become a lawyer and used to drive rolls royces around
you know, and cut a very eccentric, dashing figure. I
almost think of him like a talented mister Ripley type
of figure, you know. And he had this incredible encyclopedic
knowledge that he'd picked up through his travels, an incredible
(26:40):
sense of taste as well, very cultured person. And then
as he had this kind of epiphany later in life
when he fell in love with the place, he fell
in love with, this abandoned fifteen acre rubber plantation called Lunuganga.
He named it Lunuga, I believe in the south of
(27:02):
the country. And he looked at it and he said,
I can make something that is my version of a
classical Italian garden, but do it by a lake in
Sri Lanka, a not a lake in Italy. And then
he realized he didn't have the technical skill set to
do it. That's what prompted him to go and learn
how to become an architect and go through the training
(27:26):
and change career in his mid forties. And that naivety
almost is what allowed him to say, well, let's see
what we can do, you know, and try new things
together with this curiosity, in this sense of wanting to
experiment with things, and he partnered with very good technical architects,
(27:51):
you know. Aldrik Plesno was one other collaborator who I
mentioned in the film, who became his partner for a
period of time, and he began and kind of building
things in Sri Lanka, some of which not some of
which weren't successful. I actually went to school in a
baber building when I was five or six, Saint Thomas's
(28:13):
preparatory school. Terrible building because it was built of breeze blocks,
and he was thinking, oh, this would be lovely to have.
It was right next to the ocean, to have the
sea breeze coming in, you know, for these kids. He
didn't take into account the massive monsoon rains which rain horizontally,
and so my memory of being in his classroom is
(28:35):
constantly having to move my desk because there's a puddle
of water underneath it, and cursing.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
With colds in as well.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yes, just cursing this idiot architect who decided to build holes,
you know, early, realizing much later that was that's called it.
One of his early failed projects. He built the Sri
Lankan Parliament, which is this beautiful building on a lake
I grew up next to, you know, biking on my
BMX next to it, you know. So he is interwoven
(29:06):
into the whole of Sri Lanka in so many different ways.
And he was just this person who had this unique
perspective of understanding Western civilization, but then going and immersing
himself in Sri Lankan civilization, which dates back thousands of years,
and through him blending the two, blending everything into this
(29:30):
quite unique synthesis that spoke to classical architecture, whether it
was ancient or you know, in Western Sri Lankan, but
contemporizing it and making it something that felt fresh and
new and exciting, you know. And so he was just
a remarkable figure for his time, for his place, and
(29:54):
left behind a body of work that I think is
it's truly stunning and stands up to anybody of work
by any artist, I think in this day and age.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
And I think the movie is actor as an educative
tool as well to both public and professionals. That is
what architecture processes, I think, and it's a great tool
in that sense.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
I hope. So I think that, you know, one of
the biggest legacies, one of the biggest aha moments I
had was about his relationship to nature. And for a
long time I struggled with whether to just call him
an architect, because he was as much a landscape gardener
as he was an architect. And in Lunigaga, which is
(30:39):
as magnum Opus and Country Estate, is a stunning fifteen
acres of gardens. And I realized when I was shooting
the film, it clicked into place, and I realized that
the genius of what he did was he approached buildings
like gardens and gardens like buildings. And what I mean
(31:00):
by that is he would approach a building as a
work in progress, like a gardeners, and start with the
seed of an idea and let it take its intuitive form, growing,
adding things, frequently destroying things halfway through. He had a
reputation for just saying, actually, we don't need that wall,
(31:21):
just take it down, you know, midway through it, and
letting the building take the shape that it was meant
to be. And conversely, he wasn't afraid to look at
gardens and treat them like an extension of the indoors.
He was known for chopping down trees and leveling the hills,
(31:42):
and you know, doing landscaping in a way that would
be as casual as somebody moving furniture around inside their house.
And so by finding the perfect synthesis of both of
those things, he was then able to create these spaces
where the inside becomes the outside, you know, which was
(32:03):
one of the other titles for the film, where he
blurred the lines between the inside and the outside, between
nature and culture, so you didn't know when a building
stopped and nature began. And in doing that, he tapped
into something that's very spiritually powerful. Human beings desire to
be around and in nature in a healing way, you know.
(32:27):
And I think again that's a really powerful insight for
architects to consider now as we think about the impact
of being bereft of nature and what that does to
us and what it does to our souls. He found
a way to have that balance, and I think it's
something that the world needs more of I in this
(32:48):
day and age, you know.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Thank you very much for them exactly, and to have
the film come out now with that intension one of
the many intentions behind it. It's a brilliant educate of
taol or just a practical experience. I mean, when I
was at university, I remember the phrase architecture is an
(33:09):
old person's profession. These say it's an older man's profession,
but you know nowadays it's and I felt that as well.
I mean, it takes so much years of maturity, and
he came to it at forty to understand how buildings
impact on you, and I think coming to it at forty,
(33:30):
there's so much more. He had immaturity as to what
a building is and does, and so that's an example
of that. Yeah, there's so much to it. There's a landscape,
there's the economy, there's people's needs, there's budgets. There's the
physicality of the site, particularly like the lighthouse site built
(33:50):
on a rock, and all of that, and how to
synthesize that in the way that he was an architect, artist,
craftsperson is how we leave these kinds of buildings which
are healing.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
The Lighthouse Hotel is a great example of something where
he went above and beyond what an architect normally does.
He picked out every single piece of crockery, he picked
out the uniforms. He was an experienced designer. He thought
about the entire journey of a guest arriving at the hotel,
having a welcome drink, where to sit, where to watch
(34:24):
the ocean, and so he was applying again his immense
taste as a world traveler who'd been in the best
hotels and experienced the best service, and was replicating that
in a Sri Lankan environment. You know, he would design
the chairs. There's an entire coffee table book about Bowers chairs,
you know, and so he it was a bit of
(34:45):
a control freak, you know, in wanting to have this
exact perfection of of an experience. There's a great anecdote
in the film about how he never wanted to have
music playing at the Lighthouse Hotel because he felt like
the music of the ocean crashing against the rocks was enough.
(35:05):
And he walked in one day and there happened to
be a band playing there, much to his chagrin. And
there's a hilarious anecdote from from Hiroan Carey who gets
an irate phone call the next day from Baba saying
that manager must be fired immediately. He does don't understand
the hotel, and you know, this is long after the
hotel had been built. But he had such exacting requirements
(35:29):
about what the experience should be that he felt a
sense of ownership over it. That was you know, some
would say obsessive, compulsive, but others would say is the
secret of his success?
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Sure, And I guess it gets the comparison with Frank
Lloyd Wright as well, that kind of complete experience and
that kind of control. But I mean in your in
your work, your previous work, you would understand that experience
making that that kind of would you call him an
experience designer, Yeah, you would understand that.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Ultimately, he you know, we talk about the consumer journey,
you know, in marketing, right, and he would say he
would put himself in the shoes of somebody who was
experiencing his hotels, for instance, and about how everything made
you feel and what he wanted you to feel. And China,
(36:24):
that's what the talks about it beautifully in this in
one of his sequences where he talks about how sometimes
it was about solitude, sometimes it was about sadness. Sometimes
it was about creating spaces where somebody could experience sorrow
and being okay with that, you know, and not just
designing for light but also designing for shade, you know,
(36:46):
metaphorically and you know literally as well. And that's why
his buildings are these journeys that you go into and
you experience them, and they put you into these different
contemplative states that happen to match the moment that you're in.
And that's where I love going back to Bower's hotels.
(37:09):
I've been to some of his hotels since I was
a kid. You know, I'm fifty years old now. I've
been to the Lighthouse Hotel pretty much every decade of
my life, and I still feel something new when I
walk into different spaces, and that, to me, is a
testament to a great building that it can still make
you feel different things even though it's so familiar to you.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
And I think as a human being, you're constantly aware
of nature, aren't you in your day to day and
how that how that fix your mood and your enjoy
and your happiness. And his buildings enable you. They don't
just connect you from that natural experience, do they. They
allow you and you allow. I guess as an individual,
(37:50):
you can shoot, you can you can allow your own
individual moods and connection with nature as you do through
a building. The building is giving you that opportunity.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, and nowhere was that more impowered than the last building.
He residential building, He built which is called Red Cliffs,
which is just a pavilion roof on a cliff overlooking
the Indian Ocean. There's no walls. There is bedrooms and
bathrooms tucked away underground and at the back, but ninety
percent of the structure is just a flat roof with
(38:24):
steel columns in a garden and birds fly through it,
butterflies fly through it. The owner says, there's been you know,
packs of monkeys, they've been hedgehogs and wild boar who
wandered through it. Yeah, have stayed there many times, and
it's it's a stunning statement to say we should be
one with nature, and let me build you a house
(38:45):
where sure you might get rained on a few days
a year, but look at what is revealed to you
if you if you take away all these preconceptions and
spend time in this stunning location, that will feed your soul,
will feed your spirit in so many beautiful ways.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
And I was interested to hear you say that you
can be with a shade. It's so healing to be
with your own real feelings, not always in the happiness
and the light, but to have the time to breathe
and to allow those feelings of darkness or sadness or confusion,
(39:25):
and then you heal because you're really experiencing it. Your
body is allowed to be in that state. And the
fact that you talk about that in relation to building
is really quite a contemporary and kind of sophisticated respect
for what we're doing in terms of building.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yeah, and one of my favorite moments in the film
was when China Doswata, who was, you know, one of
Baba's closest collaborators and dear friends, is wheeling Baber, who's
now had a stroke and in a wheelchair through the
cumber Lumba Hotel, maybe ten or fifteen years after it
had had been built. And Bauer had a lot of
(40:06):
ridicule and contempt thrown at him when the building was
first constructed, because it was just you know, steel columns
in the jungle painted black and green, and people were
laughing at him and saying, what are you making. But
in that time that had passed, the jungle had grown
it and was covering the buildings and the walls and
(40:29):
the structures, and Johanna says, Baber just put his feet
down on the wheelchair and stopped. He breaked to a halt,
and he started crying, and Johanna was wondering, like, what's
going on, And he realized that Bauer was finally seeing
the building that had been in his dreams, that vision
of this incredible building that the Jungle had become one with,
(40:54):
and there was a vindication and it was a wonderful
celebration of his courage and determination to stick with something
even when nobody else understood it, and see the beauty
that could be created. And so he was having his
own moment of grief and joy and celebration all mixed
(41:16):
up into one in the middle of one of his buildings.
And I loved hearing that story and knew I had
to put it in the film.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
Yeah. Yeah, and his emotional release after the Catharsis after
years of creating it against such opposition and even the
opposition of the lens, I mean, managing to build in
that landscape and envisage that and develop the constructional details
to achieve it.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
I just let's hope listeners can refer to the film
and visit that building through your documentary.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
I hope so too. I hope everybody has a chance
to visit these five buildings. They are not to be
missed if you're an architecture fan.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
So when was the Pavilion the Redcliffs? Was that built?
Speaker 2 (42:01):
I think I need to I'm gonna need to check
my notes. I think it ended in the early two thousands,
you know.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Because pavilain concept is now, you know, becoming such an
exploratory kind of idea within us as architects, this pavilion idea,
we're just also ready for it now. And he did
it back then as a sort of completely completed product,
a completely resolved building.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
Yeah. I suspect if you want to be an architect
in the twenty first century, there are worse places to
go and get inspired by than the work of Jeffrey Boo.
There's so many facets of him, whether it was his
you know, sustainability is weaving in of indigenous architecture, His
(42:53):
desire to connect us with nature, his desire to use
indigenous materials was available to us, the whole ethos of
listening to the genius of the place in each location.
All of these are I think incredibly valuable lessons as
(43:14):
we grapple with architecture being the single one of the
single largest contributors to carbon emissions. As we grapple with
how architecture can make us feel socially isolated, with horrendous
consequences for our mental health as we look at affordability
(43:35):
and how that is driving issues. You know. So there's
there's clues in Bauer's work about how we can bridge
the gap and still create buildings that are incredibly beautiful
and incredibly sustainable, incredibly affordable, but do it from a
sense of joy and optimism and curiosity.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
That's interesting that you're not actually an architect yourself, because
you understanding and you're talking about the complicated words that
we use. But this is what it's this is what
it's about, and thank you.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
I think it'll become an accidental student of architects.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
A couple of things. I mean, you're talking about future movies.
Maybe this is a really big subject, but maybe you
could find some designers architects around this role of housing,
affordable housing. Yeah, maybe that could be. I mean it's
not just a single architect. It's very much more complex
because it's a it's a public architecture. But I think
(44:36):
we're all starting to look at that as a big
question right now. Yeah, who's working well in that field?
And there are many who are working and exploring ways
to solve us many.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
I think, I think that's an incredible topic. I'm developing
an idea called a regenerative house, which is a series
that is looking at incredibly beautiful house where they are
all net positive contributors to their neighborhoods and communities, so
not just sustainable, but even higher regenerative, meaning that they
(45:13):
give back more power, more shade, more food, more you know,
less waste in a way that actually make each house
something that enhances the quality of life not just for
the occupants but also for the immediate you know, neighborhood
as well. Yeah. I think as we look at, you know,
(45:34):
how to adapt for climate, these are all things that
people are considering and finding examples of innovation and finding
inspiring you know, stories to tell. Is something I think
I'll be very very interested in.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
Very interesting.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
Yeah. Phenom Mine is just one a worldwide architect of competition.
He's que I mean, he's actually Colombian trillion, but he
lives in New Zealand. Which was awarded at the south
by Southwest and it was housing housing design, community housing design,
affordable housing design and three D printing, you know, Yeah,
(46:15):
which is a whole other thing, going sort of much
more back into history. What I was triggered also by
the movie was this whole colonial history and and Bowers
kind of commitment to the local solutions, and of course
discovering at Portugal the Portuguese history, your colonial history, because
(46:37):
I did go to Malacca and it was kind of
confronted then, of course by the Portuguese arrival in Malacca
and the ruins of the Portuguese. And then you and
you knew I think it was a lighthouse where you
had that extraordinary sculpture of the of the of the
conflict through the stairwell of of Free Lankan history and Portuguese.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah, it's a fascinating insight into the man when confronted
with an architectural problem, which is the lighthouse hotel. The
main hotel had to be on top of like a
rocky kind of outcrop, and he had to figure out
how to get people from the base of the outcrop
(47:21):
to the top. And he could have just stuck, you know,
a bunch of elevators in there and be done with it,
but instead he drew on his knowledge again, that marvelous
encyclopedic knowledge remembered a dwelling in Greece that he had
seen once which was this kind of open air kind
of cylinder, this column, and decided to put a winding
(47:47):
three story staircase that would slowly guide people up to
the top. But instead of a functional staircase, he called
on his dear friend and collaborator, like he said, Anaika,
to build what is basically a thirty foot sculpture made
of bronze and other metals showing the invasion of the
Portuguese in a battle against the Singalese. It's called the
(48:11):
Battle of Randenia, and I think it's something in the
thirteen hundreds. And so the audacity to take what's really
a bleak moment in Sri Lankan history, the first time
that the country was invaded by colonial invaders and not
the last, and turn it into a piece of art
in a tourist hotel and turn into something which is
(48:32):
now the most photographed staircase in all of Sri Lanka
and maybe even Southeast Asia was just bonkers. Who comes
up with an idea like that, right? But that was Barbara.
He would take conflict turn into creativity. He would take
a moment of history and turn it into art and
do so in a way that blended the best of
(48:54):
both those traditions, you know, and do something that was
so striking that it transformed the space, and you know,
is an incredible work of art in its own right.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Because when you introduced this work, you were saying, you know,
we had to get from level to level, and I
was thinking, well, however, good an architecture's really not going
to be How are you going to achieve it? It's
so hard getting people from a basement level up to
another level graciously. And then also when you introduced you're
saying that the craft sculpture was going to be he
(49:28):
was a collaborating thaid, well, you know, it can turn out.
I wouldn't I wouldn't like to say naff, but you
were you were sort of apply craft to an architecture space.
How can it be that good? How can you how
can you create and make a piece of sculpture that
is so it's really going to work? And that surpassed
every expectation in terms of the extraordinary skill of the
(49:50):
maker and the design of the sculpture and telling that
story and the you know, the grasp, how you grasp
the story it's yeah, it's in the making and a
physical sense it is.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
And this is like where This is why the film
is dedicated to Bauer's collaborators, like Lucky, like Ina, like Barbara,
because I say, without him, his dreams would not have
come true because he had the vision, but oftentimes it
landed on their shoulders to translate his vision into something
that was real and enhance his vision to something remarkable
(50:27):
like that staircase or you know, INNA's textiles or Barbara's
you know, fabrics. That tactility and that craft alongside the
architecture is what created the experience, you know. And so
he was really blessed to have people who believed in him,
believed in his vision, put up with his exasperating ways
(50:50):
because they could see the magic that they were creating together,
you know, which has really stood the test of time,
and that.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
They were there those that level of skill and creative understanding,
and that he had that humility and the ability to
collaborate and the understanding of how to collaborate, That in
itself is a wonderful creative skill.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
I'm not sure the word humility would be but certainly
I think he was he understood that he needed, you know, collaborators, humility.
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Yeah, how do you collaborate it successfully? I mean, obviously
this movie is a collaboration.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
I think, you know, there was I was struck by
some of the parallels and how I tried to make
the movie and then what Bauer did as well, And
it really was finding a higher purpose, you know, in
what we were trying to do, what Bao was trying
to do. And you know I realized earlier on when
(51:54):
I was talking to the incredibly talented filmmakers in Sri Lanka.
You know that I had the honor of working with
you know that if we all said, let's make a
love letter to Sri Lanka, and let's make a love
letter so good that people will fall in love with
our country and come, that was a much better landing
(52:16):
point than hey, let's make a vanity project about this architect. Okay,
And I think in much the same way, and Baba said, listen,
let's make something that makes us as Sri Lankans, feel proud,
and let's embrace the best of our art and culture
and indigenous traditions and make it contemporary and make it
super cool. That is what allowed all of his collaborators
(52:39):
to work hard to you know, enhance their creativity and
come up with something that was way beyond what any
of them could individually achieve, and so that collective imagination
was unleashed by having that collective higher purpose. You know
that that was really the key I think in both
(53:02):
creative processes.
Speaker 1 (53:06):
I feel I don't really want to say anything more.
I wouldn't want to confuse the conversation by adding to
what you just said.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
All I would say is go watch the film. Shelter.
A dot stream is the architectural channel. You could just
google it. The website is www. The Genius of the
Place dot com. Please watch the film. I'd love to
come and talk about the film some more if you're
doing screenings and things like that, architectural practices or schools,
(53:38):
and please, please, please, if you can get on a
plane and go to Sri Lanka and see these buildings
and see this amazing country for yourself.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
One question. I mean, just Sri Lanka have spread out
massive urban sprawl. I mean you don't see it when
you're in the movie, and even when you're gurgling around
on Colombo so much sent is a wee city that's.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
Probably a, yeah, Colombo, and you know, large cities like
Candy do have some urban sprawl, but ninety five percent
of Sri Lanka is nature as beautiful jungles and beaches
and you know, ancient cities and mountains, and so you
can very quickly escape the urban sprawl and try and
(54:22):
spend as much of your time out in the beauty
of the countryside. That's that would be my advice. That's
what I do every time I go to Sri Lanka. Anyway,
how did that happen?
Speaker 1 (54:32):
How did it manage not to jungle?
Speaker 2 (54:38):
A thirty year civil war might have something to do with,
you know, stopping the progress, and you know, I think
it's in some ways it's because of that that large
parts of Sri Lanka are unspoilt. They haven't had thirty
years of rampant tourism, thank god, you know, over consuming
(54:58):
these places like some other countries have unfortunately had. So
go now while it's incredibly unspoiled, and you'll see what
I mean about the spiritual beauty of the country. It's
like New Zealand or like Bali or like Maui. It's
one of those magical island type places where you just feel,
(55:19):
you know, something special that moves you on a really
on a profound basis.
Speaker 1 (55:26):
And maybe at this moment in time, with movies such
as your own collaboration across the world globe, we're aware
that we we can't keep doing what we're doing. Why
do we have to have this dispoliation. Yeah, we have
to go forward with climate crisis and things, with this
idea of the regenerator, of build the regenerative house with
(55:48):
village and community and neighborhood and building supporting people's sense
of community. We have a turning point. We have to
do it. And maybe we don't have to think, oh, well,
eventually Sri Lanka will go become a global modern place
just like everywhere else. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it can
be an example of where we're actually going to have
(56:09):
to hit.
Speaker 2 (56:10):
I think so, you know. Sinila Jawadana, the amazing architect,
one of whom I featured in the film, she said
it beautifully. She said, the sooner human beings realized that
architecture is just shelter and anything beyond that is just selfish.
And the sooner that we can understand that we can
create shelter that allows us to be in sync with nature.
(56:32):
The better we are will be as a species, you know,
And I think the work of Jeffrey Bauer provides the
DNA provides the blueprint of how we can do that
create beautiful buildings but that are in harmony and in
sync with nature, and that together is a recipe to
really restore and refresh the human spirit.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
Absolutely, thank you so much, flus Is.
Speaker 2 (56:59):
Thank you Rosler for having me. It's been a delight
to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (57:02):
I'm speaking with f De Lizz. There's so much more
we could talk about your work, your Conspiracy of Love program.
I guess people will follow that through online.
Speaker 2 (57:11):
Check out the film The Genius of the Place dot
com and help to see you and shree like I soon.
Speaker 1 (57:16):
Okay, We're just so honored to have f del here
at Local Architecture Now. Thank you very much. This program
was made with assistance from New Zealand on Air for
radio broadcast and through the Accessmedia dot m Z website.
Thank you New Zealand on Air.
This is Rosalind Darby here from Local Architecture now for
September twenty four and we have Aftel Aziz who were
interviewing high.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
After on Hi. Rosalind, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Thank you so much. This all started back in I
think May, when I viewed along with my other professional
colleagues here in New Zealand. Are Tiro your extraordinary documentary
movie a genius of place the life and work of
Jeffrey Bauer.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yes, thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yes, so, Aftil, would you like to introduce yourself? You
are currently here as a result of your documentary and
from Sri Lanka. How does that connect? Was how I've
got to meet you today online?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, Well, my journey starts in Sri Lanka. I was
born there, I grew up there in the seventies and eighties.
I then moved to London to study and then subsequently
lived and worked in London and New York now Los
Angeles where I'm coming to you from. And I have
an entirely separate life as a filmmaker working in the
field of brand management of corporate strategy. I have a
(01:30):
company called Conspiracy of Love where we help large companies
like Adi Das and Sephora the Gap find ways to
make money by doing good. But all through my life,
I've been fascinated by storytelling. I wrote books of poetry.
When I was younger, I wrote a novel, and my
(01:52):
dream was always to make a film, and I thought
a documentary film would be a great place to start.
And when I was searching for a topic that would
obsess me to go through the arduous process of making
a film, I realized I had to find something that
I'd be passionate about telling a story about. And the
(02:13):
answer was right in front of me. It was in
my beloved country of Sri Lanka, and it was about
the work of an architect that I had grown up with,
Jeffrey Bauer, but who I realized the world knew very
little of. And so it became this quest to show
people the work of Jeffrey Baba and explain to the
(02:35):
world why he is such a legendary architect and deserves
to be celebrated alongside architects like Oscar Nemaiah in Brazil,
Lewis Barragan in Mexico, or even Frank Lloyd Wright in
the United States. And so this turned into this, this
two and a half year quest to write, research and
shoot what is now the genius of the place, the
(02:58):
life and work of Jeffrey Bauer.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So a two and a half and for the research
as well. You could see in the film the joy
and the love and the absolute awareness of what architecture
is and how you could communicate it to us as professionals.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
That yeah, thank you, yeah that you know you can't
see it. But behind me, on this bookshelf there is
a stack of coffee table books about Baba that's about
twelve inches high. And so I realized his work had
been photographed in two D plenty of times, but he
designed buildings to be moved through. You know, he literally says,
(03:44):
you know, a building must be experienced, you know, you
can't just look at it. And that's when I realized
that I could use film to immerse people in what
it was like to move through a Bauer building, and
not just move through by using drones. Move over a
bou Our building, and look at how the terrain influences
(04:07):
the buildings. And so the three words I kept repeating
to my team were make it epic, make it cinematic,
and make it immersive and really teleport the viewer into
what it was like to experience a Boer building.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
So it's interesting to hear that is your kind of
intention and aspiration, because when I was in that movie,
it was immersive. It was all of those things that
you talk about. And I could see at the end
people are getting up at the end of the credits
walking and I, I just I was transfixed. I had
to know how it had been made, who was there,
(04:46):
and I didn't want to leave my seat. I was
actually I was, you know, almost at that tearful point
because I was so moved by it and the exposure
of country and geography and landscape, which is so important
to all of us. As I can texts you obviously,
that was your brief to your team, and I think,
(05:06):
I guess maybe marketing and branding can help our profession
in that way as to how to communicate the soul
of a place.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah, I have to confess I didn't even know about
Jeffrey Bamer and I you know, I'm pretty well read
in architecture, so it just shows as you say, over
there in Tri Lanka, and I didn't know about Sri Lanka.
I mean immediately I want to now want to go
to Sri Lanka, and I'm very envious because my colleague
is going in about a month. And I googled it.
(05:36):
I googled the pathways where the nearest hostel was in
the capitol, which is what is the capital of Columbia.
I was just walking through on Google all of that
up down that river. And so that's what that movie
did to me. I'm actually almost a bit embarrassed by
my you know, whether my New Zealand draw accent can
match the beautiful tones of the voices in that movie.
(05:58):
It was a voice kind of thing as well. Well.
Obviously I don't know if you're friends of the architects
that you interviewed and the cross people you interviewed, but
it was the spoken word as well as the visual
and of course the architecture and the history of the
man himself, Jeffrey Bauer.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, well, thank you for saying that, you know, so
to give you some context, I'd been thinking about this
project for a long time, and I realized that we
were in danger of losing the oral history of Jeffrey
Bauer from the people who knew him and collaborated with him,
(06:35):
and in fact in the movie, there's three of his
I would say his greatest collaborators, you know De Silva
like you said, and Nika and Barbara SINSONI together, I
call them like the four Musketeers of Sri Lankan architecture
and design. They were close friends and amazing collaborators, and
the initial version of the film, I wanted to go
(06:56):
and interview them, and unfortunately, because of old age, they
started passing away. And so I had this moment in
the middle of COVID when I was sitting there, going
I need to get my skates on and find people
who knew him and talk to him and had a
personal recollection of him. Because it was as much a
(07:18):
portrait of the man himself as his buildings. You know,
the journey was to find five buildings which sum up
an architect's work, and when you think about Bauer, you know,
doing one hundred and seventeen buildings, that's quite a tall order.
But moreover, it was to talk to his collaborators who
worked with him on those buildings to see how they
(07:40):
revealed the man himself. And so I was very lucky
to find people like China. That's what the and morat
Ismael who were two of his closest collaborators and friends
who worked with him on many of the projects, who
were kind enough to sit down with me and talk
about their recollections of him. Snila Jiahua Dinner, who is
(08:01):
an incredible female architect in Sri Lanka, probably the best
architect working there for my money, in terms of her
environmental designs. She is a dear friend of mine and
I'm close friends with her daughters, and she was kind
enough to let me sit down and interview her. And
so it was like this kind of detective journey to
go through and meet people, including his clients by the way,
(08:25):
so Hieran Corey who was a chairman of Jetwing Hotels
with the Lighthouse Hotel, and another people who had actually
commissioned mister Bauer, and through their recollections, piece together this
portrait of this fascinating eccentric man and have him tell
their stories, tell history in their own words.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Well they did very much. So, I mean you could
hear the beautiful cinematography and of course the work and
the country in the landscape, but these voices coming through,
I think she said a few minutes ago, your your
your work is storytelling you just mentioned that as a phrase,
and I can now see how how absolutely important that
(09:10):
was to the quality of the movie that you engage
these storytellers. I mean, who was the architect, the first one,
the man with the ponytailer you just mentioned his name, Yes, well,
I ended up googling him and looking at all his
work and his lectures that as well. And first of all,
I hear in his voice, and I just assumed it
was an elderly woman's voice, a very gentle woman. And
(09:31):
then this man's face appeared with this ponytail and and
I just it's the sort of the gentility of the
whole thing was also so enjoyable sound, visual and landscape.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Thank you for saying that. Well, I'll talk a little
bit about how I approached this as a storytelling exercise, right,
And that's where I realized, you know, it's the classic
hero's journey that you would you find in literature all
around the world. You know, how does this person embark
on a journey to transform themselves, what are the obstacles
(10:08):
they face, and how do they emerge on the other
side of it? And so if you look at the
five buildings, they're actually chosen to represent five moments of
conflict in Bauer's life when he had came up against
the challenge. The first of them is the enner To
Silver House, which is this stunning courtyard house built in
the sixties. And the challenge at that time was that
(10:32):
Sri Lanka had no access to building materials like concrete
and steel and glass, all of these things that the
you know, modernist movement were using because of import restrictions.
And that's what led him to go back to using
you know, tile and stone and brick and all these
things that were readily available in villages and drawn as
(10:56):
knowledge of indigenous culture, to take the the kind of
elements of classical indigenous architecture in Sri Lanka, having sloping roofs,
high ceilings, internal courtyards, and come up with a twentieth
century version of a house that was so impactful that,
(11:18):
as I show in the film, and it was in
danger of being demolished. There was a six year project
to deconstruct and reconstruct that house. And so that's almost
like chapter one, you know, problem number one. And then
each of the different properties have different issues. In the Lighthouse,
(11:38):
how do you build a beach hotel on the place
there is no beach in the Counder lumber jungle. How
do you build something where there is uproar from environmentalists
and create something that became the first LEAD certified building
outside of America. Each time it was about how bower
(11:59):
the me and rose to the challenge with determination and
innovation and just you know, this kind of as they
call it, a stainless steel backbone. He had and persevered,
you know. And so that's where at the end of
his life, I think that's why you see him having
(12:19):
the incredible jubilation of seeing his work come to life
in the way that he wanted to. And time is
now on his side and he is vindicated in terms
of all of these incredible ideas he had and how
they came to pass.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
And you say that he had various conflicts. Of course,
he was actually a classic Modernist, wasn't he Before he
before he really embarked on the Silver House. I mean
he he was skilled. He could he could do the
modernist mid century, the urban urban work. But his right
(13:00):
awareness and understanding of architecture, particularly from a local cultural
point of view, was to move, as you said, and
the first work was the Silver h.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
He you know, he's really interesting because he had a
you know, he came to architecture in his forties. He
was a lawyer before this, and he had traveled extensively
around the world, and he'd done things like the Grand
Tour in Europe and seen ancient civilizations around the world.
So he had a deep well of understanding of architecture
for millenniua. He is obsessed with ruins and looking at
(13:33):
ruins and thinking about things as future ruins. And so
when he started his practice, yes it was in the
modernist style, and yes, some of his early work falls
into the category of what people call tropical modernism. But
then he very quickly went off at a tangent. You know,
he's almost like a musician who starts off playing classical music,
(13:55):
and he starts playing jazz, and then he starts playing
all these other kinds of music. And with each project,
his muse is actually the location, hence the title of
the film. His starting point was the genius of each place.
And then just like a jazz musician would take a
(14:16):
note and then riff on it, keep riffing on it
until it turned into a tune. That's what he'd do
with a location. He'd sit there sometimes for two or
three days, chain smoking cigarettes. Back in those days before
he even put pen to paper and starts sketching things,
observing like observing shadow. And so each creation never replicates
(14:39):
what came before, because each creation is almost like a
bespoke suit that he is creating for that place. And
so that's where the cliche is that, oh, he was
a tropical Modernist. Yeah, there's some of his buildings that
were tropical Modernists in style, but he went so much
deeper and wider and you know, beyond in throughout his
(15:00):
entire career. And that's what I wanted to show in
this documentary.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah, oh thank you. In fact, that the documentary the
name exploring this idea of place that's almost like a
current contemporary that were as architecture and designers are talking
about now, I mean way back. The is to talk
about it genius loci when I was training, but it's now,
(15:25):
but now it's that word, But now we're talking about
place in terms of urban design and things, and it's
only just becoming kind of current in people's vocabulary. So
that movie, even though you're talking about an architecture was
practicing in the fifties, I think in the sixties and seventies.
In a way, you're his understanding of place way back
(15:47):
then shows how contemporary his thinking was, because we're now
starting to talk about that as our understanding. You know,
we work from the point of the geography, from the
point of the place. How do people relate, how do
they gain their r stincts of identity by the place
that they're in, and how buildings conduit there. So the
movie is very, very very about now.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yeah, in so many ways he was ahead of his time,
you know. So that attention to having a dialogue with
the location first, as opposed to coming in with a
predetermined set of styles or signatures that they were just
plunk down, I think is something all architects need to
(16:32):
reacquaint themselves with his respect for indigenous building traditions and saying, actually,
there's a reason houses in for example, in the tropics
should be built with these common set of characteristics as
opposed to just adopting a British bungalow style of housing
(16:53):
with you know, tiny windows, you know flat roofs, and
you know slow ceilings which work great for a cold
winter in Surrey but are terrible for art tropical climate.
And reinstilling a sense of pride in our indigenous traditions
(17:13):
is another huge trend we're seeing with incredible indigenous architects
around the world. And then the sustainability of building things
which actually didn't require that much energy that made use
of breezes, that use nature as a in a what
would now be called kind of you know, biophiliac way.
(17:35):
The Kunderlima Hotel is a perfect example where he designed
it so that in fifteen years time, nature would overgrow
the hotel and it would blend in and become part
of the natural ecosystem. These are all incredible ideas to
explore now as we think about sustainability, as we think
about our relationship with the natural world, as we think
(17:56):
about our mental health and how we need nature in
our lives. That's where there's so much in his work
that I deserve, I think deserves to be lifted up again.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yes, absolutely, and that's what you did as meeting that
you always wanted to produce a movie, and what a
wonderful I mean, yes, I really do want to hit
tell the audience to look on the Shelter channel and
view this movie because it is Yeah, it's very timely.
(18:29):
It crosses so many avenues of the conversations we're having
at the moment, as you say, about place and sustainability
and connecting and understanding how nature through buildings as important
for our well being.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Thank you. Yeah, you can find it on the Shelter
Architectural Channel. It's streaming globally right now and please check
it out. And more to your point, I want to
go back to another reason I did the film, which
was I want people to get on a plane and
go to Sri Lanka, you know, like I hope you're
going to do. When we started shooting the film, Sri
(19:07):
Lanka was actually going through this massive economic crisis which
happened a couple of years ago. Thankfully it's all over
now and the tourism industry is picking back up. But
for a moment, tourism, which was one of Sri Lanka's
biggest revenue drivers, dried up completely and the narrative was
really bad. And so I was able to go with
(19:30):
a bunch of incredible Sri Lankan filmmakers, pretty much everybody
who worked on that film with Sri Lankan's together with
a couple of fantastic collaborators from Los Angeles, Paul Vu
and Hayden Blas who came on this journey with me,
and our common purpose in making the film was not
only to tell the story of this incredible architect, but
(19:51):
to show people the incredible beauty of Sri Lanka and
make them fall in love with it on screen and say,
I want to go and stay in these places. By
the way, you can go and stay in all of
these five places that are in the film as well.
So if that leads to more people going and experiencing
the country, that would be that would make us immensely happy.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
There are massive built up areas in Tree Lanker, I'm
sure there are, but the amount of jungle of jungle,
of sort of canopy, tree canopy, and those wetlands and
those lakes you know, reaching into the distance in your
footage shot from above, it was very immersive. And it's
(20:35):
a country. I mean, I don't know if you know
much about a tira on New Zealand, but we pride
ourselves on our indigenous bush coverage, our physical mountains or
rivers to the sea. So I felt the affinity that
the way that you created the respect and kind of
connection with the land in that movie and how buildings
(20:57):
actually informed that as well communicate that to people who
are living there. It really connected was the aspirations we
have for our own country.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Yeah, I mean I've been to New Zealand. I love it.
I think it's an incredible country that has spiritual beauty
and there's very few places on the planet that have it.
I believe New Zealand has it, and I believe Sri
Lanka has it. And so part of the brief again
was to expose people to not only the physical beauty
(21:32):
of the country, but to connect with that magic of
why it's something that moves you on a deeper spiritual level.
And that's where the wonderful drone photography from passindu the
are incredible. I call him an aerial cinematographer because to
call him a drone island, which just too little, was
(21:53):
gain changing. You know, to show the country from the air,
to show the beaches, the mountains, the jungles, the ancient cities,
and reveal the country from the air, and then show
how Baber so carefully mapped his buildings to the terrain
in you know, in sympathy with the terrain, to reveal paintings,
(22:19):
if you look through his windows. Every window is a
frame of a painting, looking at the ocean, looking at
the mountains, looking at the jungles. That bought a whole
other dimension. Again, I think to architectural filmmaking, because again,
if you're only ever seeing a building on a coffee
table book in two dimensions, you're missing ninety percent of
(22:44):
the spectacularness of the building. And in fact, I'm now
developing a series of movies called Moving Architecture, where I
hope to go and shoot other legendary architects and their
work in the same way, you know, using four K
cameras move through the buildings and then using eight K
drones to shoot the buildings from above and immerse people
(23:08):
in the wonder of these buildings as well, so that
I help you spend more time shooting incredible buildings. And
if anybody has any suggestions as to architects whose work
they think I should look at, happy to take suggestions, okay.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
And if I could say that it's a filmmaker and
not an architect, you're providing that service of commuting, communicating
to the wider public what architecture is, why, what it
actually is. In terms of that it's respectful place. It's
(23:41):
respectful landscape and grounding the user, the visitor, the resident,
the person in the street took place. That is why
we do what we do, and so that the movie
and what possibly upcoming movies they it's a tool for
us that you're telling, you're conveying. We're so busy doing it.
(24:05):
It's very hard often for us to communicate the importance
of building and architecture in that way that it actually
connects people to geography.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yeah, thank you for saying that. And I know I
was hugely influenced by a wonderful channel called The Local Project,
which features incredible houses in Australia and New Zealand. Please
check that out. I watch tons of it. They do
a fantastic job of simply letting a person experience a space.
I think that's maybe the barrier. Sometimes architecture can be
(24:42):
quite dense and arcane in the terminology and can be
quite intimidating to people who may not understand the jargon
or who might feel a little bit put off by
the language, Whereas if you strip away the language and
just show them the visuals the experience, everybody can get
(25:02):
it without needing to think about oh does it fall
into this school of architecture or how would I don't
have the language to explain what this architect was thinking theoretically,
you know, and Baber puts it in. That's the quote
at the beginning of the film. Baber himself said, architecture
cannot be explained, it must just be experienced. And that
(25:23):
was our starting point. Let us just show you what
it's like to experience these buildings as Baber would have
wanted you to.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Mm hmmm, exactly. Thank you for that. There's so much
to talk about, going into the colonialism as part of
the story as well, and how he elevated your culture
through his through architecture, and and Bauer himself, do you
(25:51):
want to just explain a bit more about.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
His Yeah, so, you know, he's just a human being.
He's so fascinating. His background, his cultural background is almost
a perfect combination of all the different races and cultures
that make Sri Lanka home. He was part Dutch, part Muslim,
part Eurasian. He came from a very privileged background and
(26:20):
had a chance to go and study at Cambridge and
become a lawyer and used to drive rolls royces around
you know, and cut a very eccentric, dashing figure. I
almost think of him like a talented mister Ripley type
of figure, you know. And he had this incredible encyclopedic
knowledge that he'd picked up through his travels, an incredible
(26:40):
sense of taste as well, very cultured person. And then
as he had this kind of epiphany later in life
when he fell in love with the place, he fell
in love with, this abandoned fifteen acre rubber plantation called Lunuganga.
He named it Lunuga, I believe in the south of
(27:02):
the country. And he looked at it and he said,
I can make something that is my version of a
classical Italian garden, but do it by a lake in
Sri Lanka, a not a lake in Italy. And then
he realized he didn't have the technical skill set to
do it. That's what prompted him to go and learn
how to become an architect and go through the training
(27:26):
and change career in his mid forties. And that naivety
almost is what allowed him to say, well, let's see
what we can do, you know, and try new things
together with this curiosity, in this sense of wanting to
experiment with things, and he partnered with very good technical architects,
(27:51):
you know. Aldrik Plesno was one other collaborator who I
mentioned in the film, who became his partner for a
period of time, and he began and kind of building
things in Sri Lanka, some of which not some of
which weren't successful. I actually went to school in a
baber building when I was five or six, Saint Thomas's
(28:13):
preparatory school. Terrible building because it was built of breeze blocks,
and he was thinking, oh, this would be lovely to have.
It was right next to the ocean, to have the
sea breeze coming in, you know, for these kids. He
didn't take into account the massive monsoon rains which rain horizontally,
and so my memory of being in his classroom is
(28:35):
constantly having to move my desk because there's a puddle
of water underneath it, and cursing.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
With colds in as well.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yes, just cursing this idiot architect who decided to build holes,
you know, early, realizing much later that was that's called it.
One of his early failed projects. He built the Sri
Lankan Parliament, which is this beautiful building on a lake
I grew up next to, you know, biking on my
BMX next to it, you know. So he is interwoven
(29:06):
into the whole of Sri Lanka in so many different ways.
And he was just this person who had this unique
perspective of understanding Western civilization, but then going and immersing
himself in Sri Lankan civilization, which dates back thousands of years,
and through him blending the two, blending everything into this
(29:30):
quite unique synthesis that spoke to classical architecture, whether it
was ancient or you know, in Western Sri Lankan, but
contemporizing it and making it something that felt fresh and
new and exciting, you know. And so he was just
a remarkable figure for his time, for his place, and
(29:54):
left behind a body of work that I think is
it's truly stunning and stands up to anybody of work
by any artist, I think in this day and age.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
And I think the movie is actor as an educative
tool as well to both public and professionals. That is
what architecture processes, I think, and it's a great tool
in that sense.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
I hope. So I think that, you know, one of
the biggest legacies, one of the biggest aha moments I
had was about his relationship to nature. And for a
long time I struggled with whether to just call him
an architect, because he was as much a landscape gardener
as he was an architect. And in Lunigaga, which is
(30:39):
as magnum Opus and Country Estate, is a stunning fifteen
acres of gardens. And I realized when I was shooting
the film, it clicked into place, and I realized that
the genius of what he did was he approached buildings
like gardens and gardens like buildings. And what I mean
(31:00):
by that is he would approach a building as a
work in progress, like a gardeners, and start with the
seed of an idea and let it take its intuitive form, growing,
adding things, frequently destroying things halfway through. He had a
reputation for just saying, actually, we don't need that wall,
(31:21):
just take it down, you know, midway through it, and
letting the building take the shape that it was meant
to be. And conversely, he wasn't afraid to look at
gardens and treat them like an extension of the indoors.
He was known for chopping down trees and leveling the hills,
(31:42):
and you know, doing landscaping in a way that would
be as casual as somebody moving furniture around inside their house.
And so by finding the perfect synthesis of both of
those things, he was then able to create these spaces
where the inside becomes the outside, you know, which was
(32:03):
one of the other titles for the film, where he
blurred the lines between the inside and the outside, between
nature and culture, so you didn't know when a building
stopped and nature began. And in doing that, he tapped
into something that's very spiritually powerful. Human beings desire to
be around and in nature in a healing way, you know.
(32:27):
And I think again that's a really powerful insight for
architects to consider now as we think about the impact
of being bereft of nature and what that does to
us and what it does to our souls. He found
a way to have that balance, and I think it's
something that the world needs more of I in this
(32:48):
day and age, you know.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Thank you very much for them exactly, and to have
the film come out now with that intension one of
the many intentions behind it. It's a brilliant educate of
taol or just a practical experience. I mean, when I
was at university, I remember the phrase architecture is an
(33:09):
old person's profession. These say it's an older man's profession,
but you know nowadays it's and I felt that as well.
I mean, it takes so much years of maturity, and
he came to it at forty to understand how buildings
impact on you, and I think coming to it at forty,
(33:30):
there's so much more. He had immaturity as to what
a building is and does, and so that's an example
of that. Yeah, there's so much to it. There's a landscape,
there's the economy, there's people's needs, there's budgets. There's the
physicality of the site, particularly like the lighthouse site built
(33:50):
on a rock, and all of that, and how to
synthesize that in the way that he was an architect, artist,
craftsperson is how we leave these kinds of buildings which
are healing.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
The Lighthouse Hotel is a great example of something where
he went above and beyond what an architect normally does.
He picked out every single piece of crockery, he picked
out the uniforms. He was an experienced designer. He thought
about the entire journey of a guest arriving at the hotel,
having a welcome drink, where to sit, where to watch
(34:24):
the ocean, and so he was applying again his immense
taste as a world traveler who'd been in the best
hotels and experienced the best service, and was replicating that
in a Sri Lankan environment. You know, he would design
the chairs. There's an entire coffee table book about Bowers chairs,
you know, and so he it was a bit of
(34:45):
a control freak, you know, in wanting to have this
exact perfection of of an experience. There's a great anecdote
in the film about how he never wanted to have
music playing at the Lighthouse Hotel because he felt like
the music of the ocean crashing against the rocks was enough.
(35:05):
And he walked in one day and there happened to
be a band playing there, much to his chagrin. And
there's a hilarious anecdote from from Hiroan Carey who gets
an irate phone call the next day from Baba saying
that manager must be fired immediately. He does don't understand
the hotel, and you know, this is long after the
hotel had been built. But he had such exacting requirements
(35:29):
about what the experience should be that he felt a
sense of ownership over it. That was you know, some
would say obsessive, compulsive, but others would say is the
secret of his success?
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Sure, And I guess it gets the comparison with Frank
Lloyd Wright as well, that kind of complete experience and
that kind of control. But I mean in your in
your work, your previous work, you would understand that experience
making that that kind of would you call him an
experience designer, Yeah, you would understand that.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Ultimately, he you know, we talk about the consumer journey,
you know, in marketing, right, and he would say he
would put himself in the shoes of somebody who was
experiencing his hotels, for instance, and about how everything made
you feel and what he wanted you to feel. And China,
(36:24):
that's what the talks about it beautifully in this in
one of his sequences where he talks about how sometimes
it was about solitude, sometimes it was about sadness. Sometimes
it was about creating spaces where somebody could experience sorrow
and being okay with that, you know, and not just
designing for light but also designing for shade, you know,
(36:46):
metaphorically and you know literally as well. And that's why
his buildings are these journeys that you go into and
you experience them, and they put you into these different
contemplative states that happen to match the moment that you're in.
And that's where I love going back to Bower's hotels.
(37:09):
I've been to some of his hotels since I was
a kid. You know, I'm fifty years old now. I've
been to the Lighthouse Hotel pretty much every decade of
my life, and I still feel something new when I
walk into different spaces, and that, to me, is a
testament to a great building that it can still make
you feel different things even though it's so familiar to you.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
And I think as a human being, you're constantly aware
of nature, aren't you in your day to day and
how that how that fix your mood and your enjoy
and your happiness. And his buildings enable you. They don't
just connect you from that natural experience, do they. They
allow you and you allow. I guess as an individual,
(37:50):
you can shoot, you can you can allow your own
individual moods and connection with nature as you do through
a building. The building is giving you that opportunity.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, and nowhere was that more impowered than the last building.
He residential building, He built which is called Red Cliffs,
which is just a pavilion roof on a cliff overlooking
the Indian Ocean. There's no walls. There is bedrooms and
bathrooms tucked away underground and at the back, but ninety
percent of the structure is just a flat roof with
(38:24):
steel columns in a garden and birds fly through it,
butterflies fly through it. The owner says, there's been you know,
packs of monkeys, they've been hedgehogs and wild boar who
wandered through it. Yeah, have stayed there many times, and
it's it's a stunning statement to say we should be
one with nature, and let me build you a house
(38:45):
where sure you might get rained on a few days
a year, but look at what is revealed to you
if you if you take away all these preconceptions and
spend time in this stunning location, that will feed your soul,
will feed your spirit in so many beautiful ways.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
And I was interested to hear you say that you
can be with a shade. It's so healing to be
with your own real feelings, not always in the happiness
and the light, but to have the time to breathe
and to allow those feelings of darkness or sadness or confusion,
(39:25):
and then you heal because you're really experiencing it. Your
body is allowed to be in that state. And the
fact that you talk about that in relation to building
is really quite a contemporary and kind of sophisticated respect
for what we're doing in terms of building.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yeah, and one of my favorite moments in the film
was when China Doswata, who was, you know, one of
Baba's closest collaborators and dear friends, is wheeling Baber, who's
now had a stroke and in a wheelchair through the
cumber Lumba Hotel, maybe ten or fifteen years after it
had had been built. And Bauer had a lot of
(40:06):
ridicule and contempt thrown at him when the building was
first constructed, because it was just you know, steel columns
in the jungle painted black and green, and people were
laughing at him and saying, what are you making. But
in that time that had passed, the jungle had grown
it and was covering the buildings and the walls and
(40:29):
the structures, and Johanna says, Baber just put his feet
down on the wheelchair and stopped. He breaked to a halt,
and he started crying, and Johanna was wondering, like, what's
going on, And he realized that Bauer was finally seeing
the building that had been in his dreams, that vision
of this incredible building that the Jungle had become one with,
(40:54):
and there was a vindication and it was a wonderful
celebration of his courage and determination to stick with something
even when nobody else understood it, and see the beauty
that could be created. And so he was having his
own moment of grief and joy and celebration all mixed
(41:16):
up into one in the middle of one of his buildings.
And I loved hearing that story and knew I had
to put it in the film.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
Yeah. Yeah, and his emotional release after the Catharsis after
years of creating it against such opposition and even the
opposition of the lens, I mean, managing to build in
that landscape and envisage that and develop the constructional details
to achieve it.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
I just let's hope listeners can refer to the film
and visit that building through your documentary.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
I hope so too. I hope everybody has a chance
to visit these five buildings. They are not to be
missed if you're an architecture fan.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
So when was the Pavilion the Redcliffs? Was that built?
Speaker 2 (42:01):
I think I need to I'm gonna need to check
my notes. I think it ended in the early two thousands,
you know.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Because pavilain concept is now, you know, becoming such an
exploratory kind of idea within us as architects, this pavilion idea,
we're just also ready for it now. And he did
it back then as a sort of completely completed product,
a completely resolved building.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
Yeah. I suspect if you want to be an architect
in the twenty first century, there are worse places to
go and get inspired by than the work of Jeffrey Boo.
There's so many facets of him, whether it was his
you know, sustainability is weaving in of indigenous architecture, His
(42:53):
desire to connect us with nature, his desire to use
indigenous materials was available to us, the whole ethos of
listening to the genius of the place in each location.
All of these are I think incredibly valuable lessons as
(43:14):
we grapple with architecture being the single one of the
single largest contributors to carbon emissions. As we grapple with
how architecture can make us feel socially isolated, with horrendous
consequences for our mental health as we look at affordability
(43:35):
and how that is driving issues. You know. So there's
there's clues in Bauer's work about how we can bridge
the gap and still create buildings that are incredibly beautiful
and incredibly sustainable, incredibly affordable, but do it from a
sense of joy and optimism and curiosity.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
That's interesting that you're not actually an architect yourself, because
you understanding and you're talking about the complicated words that
we use. But this is what it's this is what
it's about, and thank you.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
I think it'll become an accidental student of architects.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
A couple of things. I mean, you're talking about future movies.
Maybe this is a really big subject, but maybe you
could find some designers architects around this role of housing,
affordable housing. Yeah, maybe that could be. I mean it's
not just a single architect. It's very much more complex
because it's a it's a public architecture. But I think
(44:36):
we're all starting to look at that as a big
question right now. Yeah, who's working well in that field?
And there are many who are working and exploring ways
to solve us many.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
I think, I think that's an incredible topic. I'm developing
an idea called a regenerative house, which is a series
that is looking at incredibly beautiful house where they are
all net positive contributors to their neighborhoods and communities, so
not just sustainable, but even higher regenerative, meaning that they
(45:13):
give back more power, more shade, more food, more you know,
less waste in a way that actually make each house
something that enhances the quality of life not just for
the occupants but also for the immediate you know, neighborhood
as well. Yeah. I think as we look at, you know,
(45:34):
how to adapt for climate, these are all things that
people are considering and finding examples of innovation and finding
inspiring you know, stories to tell. Is something I think
I'll be very very interested in.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
Very interesting.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
Yeah. Phenom Mine is just one a worldwide architect of competition.
He's que I mean, he's actually Colombian trillion, but he
lives in New Zealand. Which was awarded at the south
by Southwest and it was housing housing design, community housing design,
affordable housing design and three D printing, you know, Yeah,
(46:15):
which is a whole other thing, going sort of much
more back into history. What I was triggered also by
the movie was this whole colonial history and and Bowers
kind of commitment to the local solutions, and of course
discovering at Portugal the Portuguese history, your colonial history, because
(46:37):
I did go to Malacca and it was kind of
confronted then, of course by the Portuguese arrival in Malacca
and the ruins of the Portuguese. And then you and
you knew I think it was a lighthouse where you
had that extraordinary sculpture of the of the of the
conflict through the stairwell of of Free Lankan history and Portuguese.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah, it's a fascinating insight into the man when confronted
with an architectural problem, which is the lighthouse hotel. The
main hotel had to be on top of like a
rocky kind of outcrop, and he had to figure out
how to get people from the base of the outcrop
(47:21):
to the top. And he could have just stuck, you know,
a bunch of elevators in there and be done with it,
but instead he drew on his knowledge again, that marvelous
encyclopedic knowledge remembered a dwelling in Greece that he had
seen once which was this kind of open air kind
of cylinder, this column, and decided to put a winding
(47:47):
three story staircase that would slowly guide people up to
the top. But instead of a functional staircase, he called
on his dear friend and collaborator, like he said, Anaika,
to build what is basically a thirty foot sculpture made
of bronze and other metals showing the invasion of the
Portuguese in a battle against the Singalese. It's called the
(48:11):
Battle of Randenia, and I think it's something in the
thirteen hundreds. And so the audacity to take what's really
a bleak moment in Sri Lankan history, the first time
that the country was invaded by colonial invaders and not
the last, and turn it into a piece of art
in a tourist hotel and turn into something which is
(48:32):
now the most photographed staircase in all of Sri Lanka
and maybe even Southeast Asia was just bonkers. Who comes
up with an idea like that, right? But that was Barbara.
He would take conflict turn into creativity. He would take
a moment of history and turn it into art and
do so in a way that blended the best of
(48:54):
both those traditions, you know, and do something that was
so striking that it transformed the space, and you know,
is an incredible work of art in its own right.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Because when you introduced this work, you were saying, you know,
we had to get from level to level, and I
was thinking, well, however, good an architecture's really not going
to be How are you going to achieve it? It's
so hard getting people from a basement level up to
another level graciously. And then also when you introduced you're
saying that the craft sculpture was going to be he
(49:28):
was a collaborating thaid, well, you know, it can turn out.
I wouldn't I wouldn't like to say naff, but you
were you were sort of apply craft to an architecture space.
How can it be that good? How can you how
can you create and make a piece of sculpture that
is so it's really going to work? And that surpassed
every expectation in terms of the extraordinary skill of the
(49:50):
maker and the design of the sculpture and telling that
story and the you know, the grasp, how you grasp
the story it's yeah, it's in the making and a
physical sense it is.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
And this is like where This is why the film
is dedicated to Bauer's collaborators, like Lucky, like Ina, like Barbara,
because I say, without him, his dreams would not have
come true because he had the vision, but oftentimes it
landed on their shoulders to translate his vision into something
that was real and enhance his vision to something remarkable
(50:27):
like that staircase or you know, INNA's textiles or Barbara's
you know, fabrics. That tactility and that craft alongside the
architecture is what created the experience, you know. And so
he was really blessed to have people who believed in him,
believed in his vision, put up with his exasperating ways
(50:50):
because they could see the magic that they were creating together,
you know, which has really stood the test of time,
and that.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
They were there those that level of skill and creative understanding,
and that he had that humility and the ability to
collaborate and the understanding of how to collaborate, That in
itself is a wonderful creative skill.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
I'm not sure the word humility would be but certainly
I think he was he understood that he needed, you know, collaborators, humility.
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Yeah, how do you collaborate it successfully? I mean, obviously
this movie is a collaboration.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
I think, you know, there was I was struck by
some of the parallels and how I tried to make
the movie and then what Bauer did as well, And
it really was finding a higher purpose, you know, in
what we were trying to do, what Bao was trying
to do. And you know I realized earlier on when
(51:54):
I was talking to the incredibly talented filmmakers in Sri Lanka.
You know that I had the honor of working with
you know that if we all said, let's make a
love letter to Sri Lanka, and let's make a love
letter so good that people will fall in love with
our country and come, that was a much better landing
(52:16):
point than hey, let's make a vanity project about this architect. Okay,
And I think in much the same way, and Baba said, listen,
let's make something that makes us as Sri Lankans, feel proud,
and let's embrace the best of our art and culture
and indigenous traditions and make it contemporary and make it
super cool. That is what allowed all of his collaborators
(52:39):
to work hard to you know, enhance their creativity and
come up with something that was way beyond what any
of them could individually achieve, and so that collective imagination
was unleashed by having that collective higher purpose. You know
that that was really the key I think in both
(53:02):
creative processes.
Speaker 1 (53:06):
I feel I don't really want to say anything more.
I wouldn't want to confuse the conversation by adding to
what you just said.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
All I would say is go watch the film. Shelter.
A dot stream is the architectural channel. You could just
google it. The website is www. The Genius of the
Place dot com. Please watch the film. I'd love to
come and talk about the film some more if you're
doing screenings and things like that, architectural practices or schools,
(53:38):
and please, please, please, if you can get on a
plane and go to Sri Lanka and see these buildings
and see this amazing country for yourself.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
One question. I mean, just Sri Lanka have spread out
massive urban sprawl. I mean you don't see it when
you're in the movie, and even when you're gurgling around
on Colombo so much sent is a wee city that's.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
Probably a, yeah, Colombo, and you know, large cities like
Candy do have some urban sprawl, but ninety five percent
of Sri Lanka is nature as beautiful jungles and beaches
and you know, ancient cities and mountains, and so you
can very quickly escape the urban sprawl and try and
(54:22):
spend as much of your time out in the beauty
of the countryside. That's that would be my advice. That's
what I do every time I go to Sri Lanka. Anyway,
how did that happen?
Speaker 1 (54:32):
How did it manage not to jungle?
Speaker 2 (54:38):
A thirty year civil war might have something to do with,
you know, stopping the progress, and you know, I think
it's in some ways it's because of that that large
parts of Sri Lanka are unspoilt. They haven't had thirty
years of rampant tourism, thank god, you know, over consuming
(54:58):
these places like some other countries have unfortunately had. So
go now while it's incredibly unspoiled, and you'll see what
I mean about the spiritual beauty of the country. It's
like New Zealand or like Bali or like Maui. It's
one of those magical island type places where you just feel,
(55:19):
you know, something special that moves you on a really
on a profound basis.
Speaker 1 (55:26):
And maybe at this moment in time, with movies such
as your own collaboration across the world globe, we're aware
that we we can't keep doing what we're doing. Why
do we have to have this dispoliation. Yeah, we have
to go forward with climate crisis and things, with this
idea of the regenerator, of build the regenerative house with
(55:48):
village and community and neighborhood and building supporting people's sense
of community. We have a turning point. We have to
do it. And maybe we don't have to think, oh, well,
eventually Sri Lanka will go become a global modern place
just like everywhere else. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it can
be an example of where we're actually going to have
(56:09):
to hit.
Speaker 2 (56:10):
I think so, you know. Sinila Jawadana, the amazing architect,
one of whom I featured in the film, she said
it beautifully. She said, the sooner human beings realized that
architecture is just shelter and anything beyond that is just selfish.
And the sooner that we can understand that we can
create shelter that allows us to be in sync with nature.
(56:32):
The better we are will be as a species, you know,
And I think the work of Jeffrey Bauer provides the
DNA provides the blueprint of how we can do that
create beautiful buildings but that are in harmony and in
sync with nature, and that together is a recipe to
really restore and refresh the human spirit.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
Absolutely, thank you so much, flus Is.
Speaker 2 (56:59):
Thank you Rosler for having me. It's been a delight
to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (57:02):
I'm speaking with f De Lizz. There's so much more
we could talk about your work, your Conspiracy of Love program.
I guess people will follow that through online.
Speaker 2 (57:11):
Check out the film The Genius of the Place dot
com and help to see you and shree like I soon.
Speaker 1 (57:16):
Okay, We're just so honored to have f del here
at Local Architecture Now. Thank you very much. This program
was made with assistance from New Zealand on Air for
radio broadcast and through the Accessmedia dot m Z website.
Thank you New Zealand on Air.
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