CHILDREN'S GEOGRAPHIES
Sri Lankan Vernacular Revival
The intention here, is to document a fragment of a broader aesthetic movement that's been long-time building in Sri Lankan artistic spheres. There is a distinct revival of a contemporary vernacularism that currently overwhelms everything from architecture to the types of trees planted. This renaissance is most strikingly clear in hotel design and trickles down to the everyday. As such, I will isolate, hotels and villas in this documentation. The nature of specificity in this commentary, must not be mistaken to suggest that hotel architecture in Sri Lanka is autonomous and detached from the broader penumbra of architecture. Rather, it is aimed to suggest that, the great ballyhoo of vernacularism and localism is most prominently noticeable in hospitality platform. This in turn would provide a great position to cultivate the argument, that such a revival, or even a devising of a post-tropical modernism, has more to do with appealing to Western audiences, than about a conscientious understanding of the vernacular architecture or a true cultural shift towards any form of regionalism.
Timeline
In order to set the scene, the following is a thumb through of the historical timeline of Sri Lankan architecture.
1950s- Modernist discourse on architecture for tropical environment began to animate in European circles. The conferences and discussions that followed, lead to a new architectural approach that burrowed the 'vernacular' and the traditionally 'eastern', and 'rationalised' this, through the functionalist ideals of Modernism. This 'new architecture for the tropics', was essentially a Western thinking and understanding of an eastern architecture and had everything to do with a climatological differentiation, an ecological agenda and not much to do with the people and their lifestyle. This was Modernism, an inherently Western doctrine, that burrowed Western cultural elements, that subscribed to the utopian experiments at the time, that promptly overlooked the socio-economic and cultural dynamics of the east, adapted to the monsoon and the scorching sun.
The first incisions of tropical modernism in Sri Lanka, courtesy of the likes of Geoffrey Bawa, Minette De Silva and Valentine Gunasekara, like their Indian contemporaries, were aligned to the pragmatic functionalism of the developmental state. However, like in India and the rest of the post-colonial Asia, this new breeding of architects and designers, at the face of growing nationalist propaganda and ethno-religious tensions started distancing themselves from the identity politics and socialist ideals of independent state, refusing to sign on to the growing ethnic nationalism and anxieties.
The tropical modernist coterie, withdrawn from large-scale national projects of 'modernisation', predominantly immersed themselves in residential projects. These projects were often patronised by the wealthy, upper-class - those who considered themselves cosmopolitan and were a part of imported movements and guilds. A bulk of Bawa's work, for an example, were houses for the land gentry and an exclusive group of artistically enlightened friends, that moved in the same circles. As such, in Sri Lankan, tropical modernism was accessible exclusively to the elite, up-scale minority of Colombo.
The distancing of the first generation of formally trained Sri Lankan architects from the national projects also meant that by the 1970s these projects were principally handled by the state and a new crop of locally trained architects, who amidst the economic stagnation of the 1970s were trained, attuned to the emerging American influences.
1980s- In Sri Lanka, expressions of tropical modernism declined as a result of 3 main occurrences. The first is the discontentedness with modernism due to the rise of post-modernism in western architectural discourse. The second grounds for rejection is re-discovering modernism as an idiom of socialist pragmatism and a communist ideology. The third is the reaction against Utopian projects at the countenance of tumultuous economic foreground.
Vernacular Revival
Sanctioning the demise of tropical modernism was also the shift in the Western markets away from universalised commodity production towards pre-industrial forms of manufacture. For the Western onlooker, the raw, realist cities of Colombo, Galle and Kandy, and the fragile vernacular traditions of Sri Lanka preserved the processes that had been sanitised in the First World. In short, the search for authenticity in the post-industrial nations of the West, would create opportunities for a vernacular revival, in Sri Lankan, providing it with its keenest audience.
Perhaps the biggest defence against contestation that surround contemporary vernacularism comes from Geoffrey Bawa- that architect who was bolstered up by the publishing industry and Western audiences. Bawa, who moved on from the simple and pragmatic aesthetics of modernism into
Colombo’s street children, swarming the dusty streets uncollected, unsupervised and unwashed, dissipate into the chaotic cityscape and elude attention. Discussions about street children tend to oscillate between assumptions, that street children spend their youth in apprenticeship to drug lords and rowdy gangs, eventually inheriting villainy and inevitably become the coarse bandits, that fill penitentiaries and prisons or that there is nothing immanently detrimental about many forms of street existence and in many ways living away from home can be a positive experience in developing children’s cognitive skills. The latter speaks of a street life that is mainly transient, which scrupulously brushes aside those who are born into the streets, orphans and those who have been displaced by war or natural disasters. These kinds of talk engender impoverished views on the youngsters who have made streets their abode, as an indescribable curiosity and a social burden.
Platitudinous institutions such as ‘orphanages’, as the straight forward response to the rising number of homeless children, inhabiting streets, selling flowers on the footsteps of temples and polishing shoes on the sidewalks, have been unveiled for their malfeasance and delinquencies. Based on this, the project endeavours to re-interpret childcare under the postulation that, family, kinship and spatial qualities of households are all deeply connected with politics of hope and citizenship. By exploring the interconnected factors that impel children towards street existence and paradigms of alternative care, the project seeks to propose a comprehensive and holistic approach to caring, housing and educating this population flottante.