Domus Srilanka - September 2015

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A Sri Lankan architect and committed modernist, the career of Valentine Gunasekara captures a world of architecture outside economic priviledge; its tenacious resistance to romanticised aesthetic legacies embodying a new spirit of modernity and a new metropolitan community. His marginalisation has much to do with the political climate of the period, the monocultural forces he confronted and his unwillingness to reproduce a majoritarian cultural script. Although history has judged him harshly, he offers a significant contribution to the uncharted course of regional modernism.

Within the relative isolation of the Gampola and Kandy kingdoms’ edifices, mighty in their own way, came to symbolise the integration of Buddhist heritage of thousands of years with that of Dravidian and Indo-Chinese religious architecture, yet again as a testament to the strong religious fervour of the ruler as an exemplar and guardian of the Dhamma on behalf of the ruled.

The last project completed by the recently deceased Giacomo Polin reveals his mastery in resolving a complex urban theme – a new building in between two existing historical ones – by the intelligent re-elaboration of the great Milanese tradition of modernism.