In mid-December last year, in the freshly restored Kannangara House designed by Geoffrey Bawa in 1959, an exhibition based on the late Sri Lankan master’s furniture designs opened. As one of the pioneers of the tropical modernism movement, Bawa’s furniture often receded into the background of his architecture. It is, says his protégé turned associate Channa Daswatte, what he would have wanted. “Geoffrey’s furniture was always a part of the space he designed it for—like a lot of his work, it’s not there to stand out.”
Much like his architecture, Bawa’s furniture designs were products of their time. In the Sri Lanka of the ’60s and ’70s, imports were severely restricted, making it necessary for the architect and his collaborators to innovate with method and material, often within challenging time frames. But even born of these less than-ideal circumstances, the designs were never lacking in beauty. In fact, they were often richer for it, because they brought to the fore one of Bawa’s biggest strengths: the ability to bring out the best in his collaborators.
The seed of this exhibition, though, was sown across the Palk Strait, on the Indian mainland, and more specifically, in the Phantom Hands factory in Bengaluru. Two years earlier, the Geoffrey Bawa Trust had connected with Phantom Hands to produce re-editions of six of Bawa’s better-known pieces of furniture. As the first pieces rolled out, Phantom Hands cofounder Aparna Rao, who, as a longtime Bawa admirer, should have been thrilled at being a partner in the Trust’s first ever commercial relationship, was instead beset by doubt. She had a feeling that in reproducing just these six pieces, something was missing.
Rao’s unease sprang from three main issues. The first was that since Bawa’s designs were products both of their time and limited by them, simple re-editions with all their imprecisions would not accurately convey the intent behind those pieces. “I wasn’t sure at the time if part of Bawa’s philosophy was that things didn’t need to be precise, or whether, because he wanted to support local workers, he made peace with the quality of the work they could produce,” she says.
Also, Bawa understood, perhaps better than most, that architecture and design did not exist in a vacuum. As a result, his furniture was often designed for specific spaces, to sit in conjunction with other pieces. Rao’s second worry stemmed from the limit of the selection Phantom Hands was trusted with reissuing: Could just six individual designs embody the Sri Lankan master’s philosophy when seen out of the contexts they were created in? To illustrate, she points to what Daswatte now refers to as the “Leopold” seat, meant for Bawa’s (many, successive) Dalmatians of the same name. The simple grouping of three granite blocks topped by a batik cushion had moved Rao immensely when she first saw it. “To me, that was a beautiful gesture because it demonstrated how he had designed a place for his dog—a proper seat, in which he probably thought about form and material. And somehow, this is not considered a piece of furniture?”
Rao’s third worry was perhaps the most pragmatic of them all. Would using methods and materials more suited to modern day living somehow dilute the spirit of Bawa’s designs? It was to address these questions that she, along with her team, began a rigorous, 14 month long series of explorations and prototyping to better understand Bawa’s approach. It was also a means to obtain the Trust’s approval to broaden the scope of the Phantom Hands Geoffrey Bawa collection beyond just the initial six pieces.
As the chairperson of the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, and the individual tasked with choosing Phantom Hands as a collaborator, Daswatte was initially thrown by Rao’s questions. But after one long evening of discussion at his home, he began to understand where she was coming from. The turning point, though, was when he saw the results of her explorations. Rao had displayed the prototypes in a large space, laying out objects, textures and materials as a sort of roadmap to her understanding of Bawa. It was the first time Daswatte had seen furniture designs from different Bawa projects sit within the same space. “And they spoke to each other. That was the moment I felt this was something we needed to share with people,” Daswatte says.
Today, a month after its opening, the exhibition—aptly titled Design in the Moment—features material samples from Bawa’s practice, reproductions and prototypes of the pieces, and one memorable ashtray that, like many of Bawa’s designs, seems to have materialized as a consequence of time, place and people.
The ashtray, Daswatte says, was originally designed in terracotta. When he first told Rao about it, he sketched out its shape on her paper pad, and Rao was struck by the coincidence. “It felt to me like Channa was drawing out this object for me the same way Geoffrey might have done for him.” In keeping with the spirit of Bawa’s practice, Rao then took on the role of a collaborator across time, bringing to life the architect’s idea through the materials and techniques she had access to.
The Igloo ashtray seen in the exhibition embodies the kind of interdisciplinary, intergenerational, urgency driven design that Bawa’s practice was known for. A domed brass covering (that Rao had fashioned out of a vintage ladle) sits snugly on a rounded brass dish with a slim, curved slot for the cigarette. It was designed to fit in the smoker’s hand, with the dome limiting the spread of cigarette fumes and ashes. In perhaps the most Bawaesque coincidence possible, a second version of this ashtray has an additional design element, courtesy of architect Palinda Kannangara, who is also, incidentally, Daswatte’s former student. Kannangara spotted the object on Rao’s desk and suggested, by drawing in the air, an additional base compartment that could be detached to dispose of the ash. It is design at its inventive, collaborative, considerate best.
What does Daswatte hope people will take away from this exhibition? “I think it’s revelatory of another aspect of Geoffrey Bawa. Everybody speaks of him as an architect, but because sometimes architecture is so huge, overwhelming, fabulous, and glamorous—furniture somehow brings it down to a more human level,” Daswatte says, adding, “Like that simple little ashtray.”
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