Imagining Modernity: The Architecture of Valentine Gunasekara

By Anoma Pieris

This book is a detailed study of the architecture of Valentine Gunasekara (1931-2017). It provides an innovative lens to understand the formation of a Ceylonese middle-class, which was inspired by the post-independence desire for modernity. Their experiments, values and dynamic social history are the framework for this research.

Although neglected by his peers and marginalized by the prevalent discourse on vernacular regionalism, Gunasekara’s work poses important questions regarding the utopian ideals of the modernist project and its successes and its failures in Asia. More significantly, his work reveals the European and American influences that shaped the first generation of Ceylonese architects and their efforts at adapting new materials and technologies to a very different climate and culture.

This book documents a wide range of Gunasekara’s projects including residential, religious and commercial buildings arguing that they represented a nascent cosmopolitanism from below that proved to be quite antithetical to regionalist trends in architecture.

Anoma Pieris is Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at Melbourne University. Her most recent publications include Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal history of Singapore’s Plural Society (University of Hawaii Press 2009), Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka (Routledge 2018) and Architecture on the Borderline: Boundary Politics and Built space (Routledge, Architext series 2019)

• Language: English
• Publisher: TAMBAPANNI ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
• Release date: Aug 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9786245529001

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Contents

Foreword: a personal journey…

1  Introduction: A Brave New World

2  Valentine Gunasekara: A Biography

3  Modernity and Technology

4  Redefining the Home

5  Interpreting Community

6  Global Agendas

People and Projects

Bibliography

Index

Illustration Credits

Foreword: a personal journey…

It takes more than one story to tell the history of a nation. Writing a book about an architect at the margins places a great deal of trust on the open-mindedness of the reader. It asks students and architects to recognize the passion of a personal journey and give it its due, which has been a long time coming. This book is the product of many meetings and interviews with a number of people who gave generously of their time in supporting this project. It will be most appreciated among those architects who engage with social agendas and appreciate reflective and considered approaches to architecture. Many of the projects represented no longer exist in their original form. Too many have been pulled down or have been subject to alterations that have changed the original designs entirely. Many of the buildings have deteriorated due to poor maintenance.

My very special thanks go to Christopher de Saram for introducing me to the work of Gunasekara during an era when regionalism dominated both the practice and the educational curriculum. His interest in my project and the enthusiasm of my dear friend Michele, daughter of Michael Fonseka, contractor and friend of the architect, have brought this book to light. Raba and Suren Gunasekara, the sons of the architect, encouraged me to pursue this task, and Valentine and Ranee, their daughter Nashtaka, and granddaughter Nishanthi hosted my partner Athanasios and me repeatedly in their home at Bedford. Such warmth and kindness as they have shown me, their involvement in this project at every level, and the many meals we had together are cherished by us both.

This book is the outcome of many long conversations on cold winter evenings during which Valentine Gunasekara and I poured over his drawings and photographs. These were augmented by correspondence with the engineer Jayati Weerakoon and interviews with former employees and several former clients in their homes in Sri Lanka. Ismeth Raheem was helpful in providing information on the 1965 exhibition, and Delini Raheem on details of Gunasekara’s practice. Hiranti Welendawe assisted in the production of drawings for the bibliography, which was carried out by her office staff Anurangi and Buddhini. Milinda Pathiraja, a postgraduate student at the University of Melbourne, drew the wonderful artwork included here. Ralston and Heather Bartholomeusz in Melbourne provided me with accounts of the office culture, and Berty Gunasekera supplied me with additional photographs. Anusha at Studio Times found photographs of the Tangalle Bay Hotel in the archives. My friends Varuna and Sumangala cast a critical eye over the layout and my friends and colleagues from Berkeley and Melbourne and on the web generously provided me with photographs from their personal archives. Atha, Nishanthi, Ayndri and April each at some point in time assisted with the grunt work of transcribing or scanning and printing images. Albert Dharmasiri and Ajith Jayamanne kindly undertook to layout the manuscript and Judy Pasqualge and Sita Pieris copy edited it. I am indebted to all those who supported me in this endeavour. To you, the reader, thank you for your faith in Valentine Gunasekara and your regard for his architectural contribution.

The arguments in the introduction have been raised in an essay titled The Search for Tropical Identities: A Critical History in a book co-authored by myself and Philip Goad. Portions of chapters 1, 3 and 6 have appeared previously in an essay titled Modernism at the Margins of the Vernacular: Considering Valentine Gunasekara The section on Public Works Department bungalows in chapter 4 has appeared in an essay titled The Trouser under the Cloth: Personal space in colonial-modern Ceylon. The discussion on the vernacular in chapters 5 and 6 has appeared in part in an essay titled Talking about the Courtyard.

The University of Melbourne awarded me an Early Career Research Grant which partially enabled the completion of this research. The copyright for the majority of the material included here rests with Valentine Gunasekara, who has kindly given me permission to reproduce it and with the University of Melbourne which paid for the drawing of the art work. Any other copyrights have been indicated.

The material in this book is not conclusive. There are, no doubt, many omissions for which I must apologize. It is over twenty years since Gunasekara gave up his practice in Sri Lanka. Much of this material has been gathered from his recollections during interviews conducted in the more recent past. Please forgive any errors in the spelling of Sri Lankan names or in compiling the lists of people and buildings, many of which were difficult to ascertain conclusively. The observations and arguments advanced in this book are mine, and I, as the author, take full responsibility for presenting them to you.

For me, the writing of this book has been an education humbly sought and an opportunity to learn architecture again through the life of an exceptional talent interwoven with threads of rationality, reflexivity, philosophy, self-doubt and emotion, as it should be.

Anoma Pieris

Melbourne 2007

Chapter One

Introduction: A Brave New World

The dystopian vision of a brave new world, scripted by a technology-driven environmental determinism, has irrevocably prejudiced us against the modernist project and along with it the experiments of the 1950s to 1970s¹. Modernism, the aesthetics of the European avant guard, is, in the postmodern architect’s view, an empty universal shell devoid of history and culture, a tool of top-down economic policies whether socialist or capitalist. Its monolithic forms cast deep shadows subjugating a diminished urban citizenry. It was a utopian project that somehow misfired. At the core of its problematic was a Eurocentric humanism, shaped by enlightenment ideology, reinforced by early twentieth-century colonialism and disseminated as an apolitical and universal value.

This book strives to recover a modernist legacy from under the heavy burden of its postmodern prejudices and focuses on the creative energies that were released in one of the most unusual moments in architectural history. Today, when a post-modern pantheon has readily appropriated modernism as one of its many stylistic agendas, such an exercise is both timely and unproblematic. A decade ago, when revisionist histories, regionalism and local identities were making a stand against the universal aesthetics of globalization, such an undertaking would have been politically inappropriate. The failure of nationalist projects in post-colonial contexts and the suspicion that regionalism was both divisive and vulnerable to global capital underwrite this early release of modernism from intellectual confinement. Ethnic conflicts and rising religious fundamentalism based on regionalist identities in Asia have provoked a re-evaluation of humanist values of human rights and social justice. In the post-colonial period where the ‘ethics’ of the colonial encounter have been exposed to general scrutiny, a culture-specific home-grown system of ethics that reconsiders humanist values may even seem desirable. For architecture, such issues take us back to a question that was raised by the early Asian modernists, practitioners who struggled with a new expression of modernity adapting it to climate, available technologies and building practices. Is there a brand of humanism that can evolve from local identities and deliver equitable dwelling environments to the majority of the people? How can a secular architecture adequately represent the diverse and often divisive ethnic, religious and language-based identities of post-colonial societies? This book attempts to complicate a history that has been oversimplified, stigmatized and in many cases erased from the architectural curriculum.

How do we write about modernism and its impact on Asia? Was it applied very differently in Eastern and Western societies? How did it engage and reflect the turbulence of post-independence economics and social change? Was it innovative? The modernism described in this book is articulated through the struggle of a lone Sri Lankan architect whose attempt at introducing new technologies and social agendas into a hierarchical society was resisted at many levels. It brings to light the highly reflective process of modernist experimentation, its social critique and its technological daring, all of which were suppressed by the rhetoric of regionalism. It also answers two questions that were encountered in researching this book. Can architects in developing nations afford to ignore social agendas, i.e., is art for art’s sake permissible? This book argues that all art is ultimately political. The second question is why Sri Lanka did not produce a cohort of modernists like the Malayan Architects Co-Partnership, Team X or their Japanese and Latin American equivalents. In the two decades when the most rigorous and creative modernist experiments took place outside Western contexts, why did Sri Lanka hold back? The answer to that question will unravel in the writing of this book on Sri Lanka’s anti-hero Valentine Gunasekara.

Post-independence architecture in Asia

Modernism in Asia was initially a reaction to the Indianized forms of civic architecture prescribed through the Public Works Departments of Britain’s colonial administrations. The colonial government, as observed by Homi Bhaba, adopted a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic,² in this instance combining two architectural styles: the Hindu, Islamic and Buddhist architectures of Asia with the classical architecture of Europe (Figure 2). Supported by a revival of arts and crafts movements both in Britain and in its colonies these hybrid styles were tested in colonial exhibitions, palaces for princely rulers, and colonial museums. They culminated in the plan for New Delhi and the Viceroy’s residence (1912-31) designed by Edwin Lutyens. Post-independence, the Indic style set the stage for a particular strain of cultural ambivalence, which drew liberally from both Eastern and Western sources. It was also transposed on two early modern architectural styles (1920s-40s), De Stijl and Art Deco, which were more adaptable to the apartment blocks, hospitals, cinema halls, and educational buildings designed by British architects for a post-independence society.

Understandably, during this early period, when autonomy was the guiding objective, modernism became the language through which to resist the colonial inheritance. Read against the hybrid civic architecture of the early twentieth century, it offered a brand new architectural template that could erase all colonial associations from the past. Moreover, religion, ethnicity, and language, the divisive culture, of post-independence society, would be unified under its standard. Three urban experiments in the tropical region embodied these ideals. Brasilia, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, explored new and expressive forms in concrete technologies breaking out of the modernist box inherited from Europe (Figure 3). Singapore’s public housing strategy actualized Le Corbusier’s ideal city and within two decades offered the citizens equitable dwelling conditions. In South Asia, modernism’s most salient example was Le Corbusier’s design for Chandigarh, a new state capital for Punjab built in the 1950s on the invitation of the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Lal Nehru (Figure 4). The undercurrents of ethnic unrest that had scarred Indian independence in 1947 were to be smoothened over by the universal values of International Style architecture. But this trend was undoubtedly of Western origin and was viewed by many as continuing a colonial tradition of experimenting in former colonies, when opportunities to build large-scale projects under tabula rasa conditions were no longer available in Europe. Moreover, the use of concrete in the brutalist aesthetic of that period would, over time, attract considerable criticism as having introduced culturally alienating architectures to these specific contexts.

The post-independence desire for modernity also generated channels for the importation into Asia of ‘foreign experts’ who returned to former colonies in order to prescribe a secular architecture. In doing so, modernist experimentation reinforced a patronizing relationship between ex-colonies and their metropolitan centres of architectural production. This movement from economic centre to periphery brought many European architects, including Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, Charles and Ray Eames, Edward Durrel Stone, Joseph Stein and Laurie Baker, to India. Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew came to Sri Lanka. Conferences and educational programmes held in Europe, but focussed on former colonies, were likewise directed toward modernism.

One of the key attributes of modernism from the 1950s to 1970s was its social vision for urban life and its intervention at community level. This approach encapsulated both its major strengths and weaknesses. Whereas in Europe the modern movement offered useful tools for post-war reconstruction on limited budgets, in post-independence Asia it produced the architecture of modernization. Although the modernism of this period had evolved from the modernist avant guard, after CIAM 8 (Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) there followed a range of experiments that included in their focus programmatic change, community buildings and futuristic urban experiments³. Moreover, because of the sheer scale of post-war urban reconstruction, the architect as team member replaced the heroic ideal of the lone architect. A form of expressionism following the Brazillian school, new brutalist architecture following strains of British functionalism for new towns, and the futuristic urban experiments of the Situationists, Archigram, the Metabolists and the Smithsons were in turn translated to Asian contexts by a generation of practitioners trained in Europe. In India, Balakrishna Doshi of Team X defined new forms of urban community that were culturally inscribed (Figure 5). Through expressive forms and innovative engineering he undertook a range of programs from institutional buildings to residential complexes and opened up modernism to new imagery and symbolism. Similarly, in Japan, Kenzo Tange and URTEC produced a radical plan for Tokyo Bay in the form of an extended urban spine across the water⁴. Their Tokyo Olympic stadium, designed in 1964, was a concrete icon bridging modern technologies and traditional form (Figure 6). These early Japanese experiments influenced the Metabolists, perhaps the most daring visionaries from Asia, who designed vast futuristic environments based on patterns found in biological organisms. Meanwhile, with the return to South and Southeast Asia of the first generation of architects trained in modernism, particularly in modernism for the tropics, these experimental trends found new turf.

The task facing a new generation of local architects in the post-independence era was twofold. On the one hand they were engaged in constructing a sense of geographic belonging against a former history of colonial expression, European modernism and its counterpart of chauvinistic nationalism. On the other hand they needed to reconcile their European design training in modernism to the design of tropical environments in a specific region. Consequently, in their resolution of a post-colonial subjectivity that was split between Europe and Asia, identity was conflated with geography and modernity was abstracted into climate-driven responses. The architecture that evolved from this approach was considered democratic, free of the impediments of westernization, the colonial class structure, race, or religion.

This new trend in modernism, although visible in the architecture of Chandigarh and later in the capitol at Dhaka, designed by Louis Kahn, appeared less appealing to South Asians (Figure 7). Neglected by their political elite and entrenched in their religious and ethnic identities, South Asians found both meaning and solace in the particular non-secular communities built around them. An architecture that ignored the pressures of race and religion held little credence for such a communal-minded polity, despite the magnitude of the political democracy surrounding them. Poverty, political negligence and, in V.S. Naipaul’s description, a million sectarian mutinies against a corrupt secular state shaped varied forms of identity politics that in turn provoked an identity-driven architecture.⁵ For these reasons modernism found its most fertile ground not in its previous South Asian context but in Southeast Asia, providing the language for national developmental agendas. There, it was applied to a wide range of programmatic solutions. In Indonesia architect/President Sukarno’s guided democracy was realized through a number of modernist buildings: Monas⁶, the national monument, Hotel Indonesia, Independence Mosque, Asian Games Complex and the Jakarta Bypass, all of which signified the nation’s ambitions.⁷ In Cambodia the architect Van Molyvann created a New Khmer style combining Angkor sculptural effects with new brutalism;⁸ and in the Philippines a new generation of architects led by Leandro V. Locsin designed experimental multi-storey office buildings for Makati, a planned urban development.⁹ It was their programmatic innovation and structural daring that marked these architectural projects as different from their colonial predecessors. Theirs was an attempt at shaping a brave new world. It was a vision so profound that Malaysia, inspired by notions of modernity, chose a modernist tower block for its first parliament (Figure 8)¹⁰. Designed by JKR (Jabatan Kerja Raya) and Ivor Shipley in 1963, both the structure and fenestration of this building resembled an Islamic mosaic when viewed from afar.

This position resonated with architects in Malaysia and later in Singapore, the youngest of Southeast Asian nations, which following independence in 1965 had embarked on an unprecedented journey of progressive nationalism. Its anti-historical quest for tabula rasa conditions was a reaction to the ethnic riots of 1964 and was couched in the global rhetoric of modernization. Cognizant of the fact that it was aspiring to bind a multi-racial polity through geographic nationalism, Singapore turned to a neutral aesthetic that would not resonate with any one of its communities. A surge of economic growth and a parallel project of social engineering would provide a ready template for a range of modernist experiments. In Singapore utopian experiments inspired by Le Corbusier’s ideal city and the Metabolist urban vision were realized at an intimate scale.

Owing to their shared political geography during the early 1960s, Singapore and Malaysia would produce one of the strongest cohorts of Asian modernists, second only to Japan. The architects of the Malayan Architects Co-Partnership (Lim Cheat, Voon Fee, William Lim), and architects Ken Yeang and Tay Kheng Soon were a part of this tradition aimed at deliberately contextualizing the global aesthetic through climatic responses. Initially contributing to the modern state’s developmental agenda and later among its major critics, through organizations such as SPUR (Singapore Planning and Urban Research Group), the debates on modernism evolved from economic pragmatism to ecological concerns. Among the many experimental buildings of the co-partnership was the Singapore Conference Hall with its modernist lines and passive environmental responses encapsulating a particular strain of tropical modernism (Figure 9).

It is important to recognize the significance in Southeast Asia of the climatic trope in the construction of this new architectural imaginary of a static bounded territory and a dynamic and temporal experience of it. In the search for identity through architecture the climatic approach appeared to be both inclusive and innocuous and yet able to accommodate the key tenets of modernism. Attention to local regional variations was used to define particular communities within national boundaries while the climate was used to claim more general regional alliances. Through climate, the once colonized territories of Southeast Asia could reclaim their common history and forge a geographical identity as a vast regional landscape spanning three oceans. As a group of developing nations struggling to gain attention in the global marketplace, this collective identity and contiguous geography gave the region a substantial presence. The ‘tropical’ could be read as anti-colonial, anti-traditionalist and anti-international style, an architecture of resistance, as proposed by Kenneth Frampton.¹¹ It would re-direct the architectural discourse on modernism towards a postmodern interpretation of identity, through a climatically derived vernacular architecture. In doing so it would limit itself in terms of both materials and processes.

Although the modernism of the 1950s to 1970s demonstrated