01/31/2019
For those who did not know.
Sri Lanka's Parliament in the 1980' a place for Gentlemen with the crowning glory of this incredibly beautiful Chandelier.
Designed and created by "LAKI the Artistan"
1980දී ශ්රී ලංකාවේ පාර්ලිමෙන්තුවේ මහත් අලංකාර වූ රාජකීය පහන් පොකුර Designed and created by
"LAKI the Artistan"
As we travel through Sri Lanka, its strong literary voices come crashing in like waves, and life seems to imitate art.
I sit in the huge living room of the old governor’s home in Jaffna. The walls, painted... a warm rose-red, stretch awesome distances away to my left, to my right and up towards a white ceiling. When the Dutch first built this house egg white was used to paint the walls. The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling themselves from each other’s shoulders. — Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje.
The first thing we notice as we enter the hotel in Galle is the massive winding staircase. As we ascend, climbing alongside us is a sculpture of the Portuguese-Sinhalese encounter on the battlefield: Sinhalese warriors and Portuguese invaders frozen into brass sheet and copper, with animals, weapons, cannons, pennants, all making their way intractably along the balustrading to a blue-tiled dome. It is sculptor Laki Senanayake’s depiction of the Battle of Randeniwela, waged in 1630 between the Portuguese invaders and the Sinhalese warriors, with life-sized horses and horsemen, bows and arrows, a head on a spear, and above it all, the Sinhalese king playing the flute.
Trying to read up more about this battle, I find an essay by historical novelist and historian Gaston Perera in The Island. The Portuguese attack was led by the fidalgo Constantino de Sá de Noronha, who would be killed in battle. A Portuguese account of the fierce clash mentions that a thunderstorm had soaked the Portuguese firepower. Perera adds that this detail is indirectly confirmed by a local story: “The belief among the villagers is that a party of Kandyan archers was stationed here during the fighting with orders to shoot fire arrows — arrows tipped with burning arecanut husk, kamaranka puwak — at the place where the Portuguese had spread their powder out to dry. This oral tradition has nothing to say about a storm but why should the Portuguese have to dry their powder?” It was a decisive victory for the Sinhalese.
A building can only be understood by moving around and through it, and by experiencing the modulation, and feel the spaces one moves through — from outside into veranda, then rooms, passages, courtyards. Architecture cannot be totally explained but must be experienced. It should play to all the senses — the smell of vegetation after rain, the sound of birds, and the wind in trees. — Geoffrey Bawa
