Visiting Lunuganga, Geoffrey Bawa’s most extraordinary work
Walking through the gates of Lunuganga, architect Geoffrey Bawa’s country estate, is like stumbling upon a lost city from an ancient civilisation. Following the dirt path that leads away from the entrance, you soon arrive at a group of weather-beaten buildings clustered around an unkempt lawn. A crumbling brick wall lines one side of the lawn, and discolored stone vases lie about. Green, moss-covered steps lead uphill to an apparently empty bungalow and down a steep cliffside to the river, which stretches away into the horizon. There are no signs of life, human or animal, and the only sound is the wind brushing through the trees.
Of course, Lunuganga isn’t an ancient city. It’s a 25-acre former rubber plantation that Bawa slowly transformed, over the course of 40 years, into the garden of his imagination. Like the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who made his home, Taliesin, into a laboratory for his most radical ideas, Bawa made Lunuganga his most personal project.
Surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by thick jungle, this tropical retreat was designed to be a "garden within a larger garden" — a verdant oasis within a country already famous for its natural beauty. Bawa intended the estate to appear faded; he said that he wanted it to "look like it had been there forever."
Building Lunuganga
Designing buildings and gardens that look old is harder than it sounds. Having bought the land in 1948, Bawa spent the rest of his career planning, digging, cutting, planting, shaping, furnishing, and decorating the estate. Working without a master plan, Bawa allowed the contours of the land to guide his landscaping. New ideas occurred to him as he worked. He improvised, and extemporised.
Deciding that he wanted a view from his bungalow of a nearby lake, Bawa levelled the hillock blocking his sightline. He cut a wide trench through the estate and lined it with vegetation to hide the main road. To capture the best light, he placed his breakfast table on the west side of the house, his dinner table on the east side, and his lunch table overlooking the river. Over each table was a bell, which Bawa rang when he wanted his meal prepared.
My guide for the day was a man who had lived at Lunuganga since he was four, when his father was hired as one of the estate’s six full-time gardeners. Both father and son knew Bawa well, since the architect worked so closely with his Sri Lankan staff, and the guide spoke reverently of "Mr. Geoffrey."
He showed me where Bawa’s ashes are buried, beneath a Moonamal tree overlooking the lake. In keeping with the simplicity of Lunuganga, the grave is marked only by a blank stone tile.
Today, Lunuganga is preserved exactly as Bawa left it. When a tree dies, the gardeners immediately replace it. Although it looks neglected, Lunuganga actually requires continual labour to keep the jungle from encroaching on the landscaping.
"This would be a great place for a garden!"
The estate grew by accretion. First, Bawa built his bungalow, then the barn-like reading room, the dual-level studio, and the four guest villas (now rented out to vacationers). He carved out terraces along the cliffside for walking paths, and dug two windmill-powered wells. Bawa’s friend Donald Friend, the Australian artist, made decorative stone vases to place around the garden.
These were joined by ancient stone relics, including a phallic shivalingam that Bawa bought and carted to Lunuganga. Although the buildings were made from Bawa’s designs, they were often made out of materials — glass windows, wood panelling, floorboards — scavenged from older dwellings, which makes it hard today to determine their age. A visitor once asked Bawa how many centuries old Lunuganga was; another told him that it would be a great place for a garden. Bawa was flattered.
Sitting in the bungalow’s loggia after a tour of the estate, sipping a lime soda, it’s easy to see why Bawa loved Lunuganga. With nothing but river and jungle as far as the eye can see, this may be the most peaceful spot on Earth.
It seems infinitely far from Colombo. As you gaze out across the estate, the bungalow, the loggia, the lawn, the vases, all seem to melt away into a diffuse greenness, erasing the line between art and nature. Lunuganga, you realise, is the work of a genius profound enough to hide his work in plain sight.