WHAT WOULD BAWA DO? WONDERS APARNA RAO, COFOUNDER OF PHANTOM HANDS, AS SHE PRODUCES REISSUES OF GEOFFREY BAWA'S HIGHLY CONTEXTUAL FURNITURE.

In mid-December last year, in the freshly restored Kannangara House designed by Geoffrey Bawa in 1959, an exhibition based on the late Sri Lankan master's furniture designs opened.

- DIVYA MISHRA

As one of the pioneers of the tropical modernism movement, Bawa's furniture often receded into the background of his architecture. It is, says his protégé turned associate Channa Daswatte, what he would have wanted. "Geoffrey's furniture was always a part of the space he designed it for-like a lot of his work, it's not there to stand out."

Much like his architecture, Bawa's furniture designs were products of their time. In the Sri Lanka of the '60s and '70s, imports were severely restricted, making it necessary for the architect and his collaborators to innovate with method and material, often within challenging time frames. But even born of these less-than-ideal circumstances, the designs were never lacking in beauty. In fact, they were often richer for it, because they brought to the fore one of Bawa's biggest strengths: the ability to bring out the best in his collaborators.

The seed of this exhibition, though, was sown across the Palk Strait, on the Indian mainland, and more specifically, in the Phantom Hands factory in Bengaluru. Two years earlier, the Geoffrey Bawa Trust had connected with Phantom Hands to produce re-editions of six of Bawa's better-known pieces of furniture. As the first pieces rolled out, Phantom Hands co-founder Aparna Rao, who, as a longtime Bawa admirer, should have been thrilled at being a partner in the Trust's first-ever commercial relationship, was instead beset by doubt. She had a feeling that in reproducing just these six pieces, something was missing.