Design in the Moment: Furniture by the Geoffrey Bawa Practice

Design in the Moment: Furniture by the Geoffrey Bawa Practice, open now and on view until 31 May 2025 at The Bawa Space in Colombo, offers a rare glimpse into the innovative and deeply contextual furniture designs of one of Asia’s most celebrated architects. Curated by architect Channa Daswatte, Chairperson of the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, and Aparna Rao, co-founder of Bangalore-based furniture maker Phantom Hands, the exhibition examines Bawa’s approach to furniture as an extension of his architectural language.

At the heart of this show is a collection of prototypes and material samples from the Geoffrey Bawa Practice, offering insight into how Bawa and his associates responded to the economic, social, and environmental conditions of their time. “When designing his early projects, Geoffrey Bawa understood the need for furniture and fittings that worked with the new approach,” Daswatte and Rao tell. “This was an architecture that was not made from a particular ideological position, but as a modern response to social, economic, environmental and cultural situations.”

Bawa’s practice frequently collaborated with local makers and craftspeople, including metalworkers, woodworkers, and fibreglass boat builders, to create pieces that were both practical and aesthetically singular. “Each piece emanates an energy that livens up its particular location or the other pieces with which it was made; never a protagonist, but always part of a wider context,” the curators explain. The exhibition highlights how these designs were often unsolicited by clients, driven instead by the constraints of material availability and budget.

A significant theme of the presentation is the question of authenticity in reproduction. The Geoffrey Bawa Collection by Phantom Hands, launching alongside the exhibition, aims to offer contemporary re-editions of Bawa’s iconic designs, such as the Next-Door Café Chair and the Saddle Chair. However, as Rao points out, “Is the object to be a complete reproduction down to each screw, or is the process and intent as important as the aesthetic?” She continues, “In adopting new techniques of making and demands of a market such as sustainability while acknowledging the passing of past methods of production, what makes for an authentic reproduction of something that, in the first place, was not even commissioned?”

This interrogation of process and meaning makes Design in the Moment more than a retrospective; it is an invitation to consider how Bawa’s approach to design remains relevant today. His work was never about static perfection but about adaptability, collaboration, and context. This ethos is carried forward in the exhibition, which not only revisits the past but also explores how these designs might inform the future of sustainable and context-driven furniture-making.



Feature image: Design in the Moment: Furniture by the Geoffrey Bawa Practice. Photo: Keshav Anand