Architecture for the Senses

“Architecture for the Senses” brings together over 250 exhibits, including drawings, models, furniture, historic footage, artworks, and photographs by Bawa, including newly commissioned works by photographer Iwan Baan that capture the lived-in quality of some of Bawa’s most iconic buildings, and  scenography designed by architect Lina Ghotmeh.

With a career spanning five decades and over 200 projects, Geoffrey Bawa (1919– 2003) was one of the most influential twentieth-century architects in Asia. His work blends the principles of modernism with the rich architectural history of Sri Lanka, forming a distinctive oeuvre that includes private houses, schools, hotels, and factories, as well as the country’s parliament. 

The core of the show is formed by a vast selection of objects, models, and documents from the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, as well as archival images by Sebastian Posingis and Dominic Sansoni, with the addition of new photographs and films that provide a contemporary perspective on the intensity of Bawa’s buildings and their powerful natural environments. 

A focus of the exhibition is Bawa’s close collaboration with some of Sri Lanka’s leading artists and craftspeople, including Ena de Silva, Laki Senanayake, and Barbara Sansoni. These artists’ workshops were run as social enterprises and played an important role in providing training and employment to local communities. Their batik panels, sculptures, and textiles were not merely decorative additions to Bawa’s buildings, but integral components of their spatial experience, blurring the boundaries between architecture, art, and design.

Bawa has been labelled a pioneer of Tropical Modernism, but the exhibition will present a more multilayered perspective on Bawa’s work than such simplifying etiquettes can suggest. By highlighting Bawa’s engagement with collaboration, ecology, and the cultural context of architecture, the exhibition foregrounds him as an innovator of socially responsible and sustainable building practice, whose approaches are more relevant today than ever.

“Architecture for the Senses” is a co-production of the Vitra Design Museum, the M+ museum of contemporary visual culture in Hong Kong, the German Wüstenrot Foundation, and the Geoffrey Bawa Trust. Following its premiere at the Vitra Design Museum, the exhibition will then travel to Hong Kong, where it will be shown from June 2027; further venues are currently being planned. A richly illustrated catalogue featuring essays, project descriptions, and interviews with architects Kengo Kuma, Tatiana Bilbao, Marina Tabassum, and Lina Ghotmeh accompanies the exhibition.