Vitra Design Museum Maps Geoffrey Bawa's Sensory Modernism

Geoffrey Bawa never built outside Sri Lanka, India and Southeast Asia – yet Vitra Design Museum has mounted its first full exhibition devoted to him, open from 26 September 2026 to 28 February 2027. 'Geoffrey Bawa: Architecture for the Senses' argues that the Sri Lankan architect stands among the most influential figures in 20th-century modernism.

"When you talk to people in Asia, Bawa is extremely well known. No matter whether it's in Japan, in China, or in India, Bawa is like a hero," Vitra Design Museum director Mateo Kries said at the opening. "I had seen the works. Rolf Fehlbaum, our museum founder, had travelled and seen them, and we both thought we should do something on him."

Born in 1919 to a family of mixed Asian and European heritage, Bawa worked as a lawyer before training at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He graduated in 1957, returned to his home country and set up a studio there. Over his career he worked on some 200 projects – some still standing and preserved, some demolished, several never built. He died in 2003.

Four rooms, one sensibility

The exhibition unfolds across four rooms. The first opens with Bawa's own homes: his urban house in Colombo and his countryside base at the Lunuganga Estate in Bentota, which remained an ongoing project until his death. He designed both the structures and the gardens, and the pair demonstrates how he treated terrain, nature and wildlife on each site as an integral part of the project. Both properties are now run by the Teardrop hotel group, and several of the spaces within, including his private quarters, can be booked for overnight stays.

The second room situates Bawa within the political and socioeconomic context of his time in Sri Lanka. It examines his material experiments and foregrounds his public and social work, less familiar than his residential designs. These include St Thomas' Preparatory School, where Bawa trialled modernist construction and breeze-block ventilation that ultimately proved difficult in the country's hot and humid climate, and the New Sri Lankan Parliament in Kotte. The room also covers the Ena de Silva house, recently relocated to Lunuganga.

Room three, titled 'Weaving art into architecture', examines Bawa's collaborations with artists and craftspeople. Fabrics produced by his client Ena de Silva, paintings, mosaics and more entered his buildings not as decoration but as building elements – a fabric that was the ceiling, a mural or relief that formed part of the structure from the start.

"He really saw architecture and art as intertwined, so we call this room 'Weaving art into architecture', and the focus is on those creative collaborations and how these work," said Shayari de Silva of the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, who co-curated the show alongside exhibition curator Johan Deurell and Ikko Yokoyama of M+. "So when you see a batik panel above, it is literally a ceiling. It's not art on a ceiling."

The final room zooms out to the 'total picture': entire sites shown through aerial imagery, drawings and the interaction between Sri Lanka's lush vegetation and Bawa's designs. Exhibits include the Kandalama hotel – with its planted roofs, one of the world's first green eco-hotel projects.

Kries on why Bawa, why now

For Kries, the exhibition's relevance extends beyond one region. "We think Bawa is just one architect who shows how the International Style or modernist architecture connected with local traditional, and even colonial influences, and of course Bawa is not the only one to do this; but Bawa is probably one of the most influential examples."

He added: "We wanted this to be an intense, immersive show. It should convey something of that intensity of the places where Bawa built. When you go there, the colours are very intense. Nature is very present because it's [of a kind] that grows extremely fast. It takes over in no time."

The curators assembled archive drawings, models, film and newly commissioned photography by Iwan Baan. Beirut-based architect Lina Ghotmeh designed the exhibition, creating a warm, enveloping environment that draws the visitor closer to Bawa's Sri Lankan context while remaining in harmony with the Vitra Design Museum's own building – Frank Gehry's 1989 original.

The exhibition travels to M+ in Hong Kong after its run at Vitra, giving audiences in Asia – where, as Kries notes, Bawa is already a hero – a chance to reassess an architect who fused modernist principles with Sri Lankan tradition on his own terms.