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“Thinking” the Domestic Interior in Postcolonial South Asia: The Home of Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka, 1960 to 1998

This critically-informed article interrogates the case study interior using object association or bricolage as a frame of analysis, and thereby makes an innovative contribution to knowledge and understanding of South Asian design and spatial practice in that region post-1948. The article considers Bawa’s arrangement of interior space in his own home as a technique of bricolage, the term used here to conceptualize the structuring of domestic space through practices of furnishing, thereby making that space meaningful. It is argued here that through the combination and juxtaposition of different object categories (including ‘antique’ colonial furniture, locally-produced copies of International Modern furniture and contemporary Sri Lankan art works) Bawa evolved a new mode of interior design for island that allowed for the articulation of different narratives to those of the colonial period. However, it is suggested that these narratives were neither progressive nor utopian in the modernist sense. Bawa simply re-arranged what was already there and used what was to hand. Through a process of object association, he created a series of openings for symbolic content (within his home), which were denied by the rationalist forms of modernism. The intention of his spatial practice as an architect in post-colonial Sri Lanka was not to make the world anew. The article’s significance lies in its contribution to present-day debates in Sri Lanka about contemporary architecture and the production of national and cultural identity. It does so by drawing attention to the fact that Bawa’s spatial practice was not concerned to create a national identity that was modern, secular and unfettered by colonial historicism. Instead, through practices of object association or bricolage in his home, he created an alternative imaginary space that alluded to the colonial/feudal past of the island, but that was at once atavistic, inauthentic and removed from history.