You Had to Be There

“You cannot have an answer to playing pool—you can only react to the next arrangement of the balls on the pool table. And a good player knows how to react to those conditions,” said Keller Easterling, as though to set up the title of the exhibition, It is Essential to be There that opens on February 1 at the Geoffrey Bawa Trust in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The title pulls from a quip by Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa about the importance of the site to design, and implicitly lays a case against the internationalization of architecture. Easterling was in conversation with Shayari De Silva, the curator of art and archival collections and organizer of the show.

Easterling primarily focused on her book Medium Design, asking, as architect V. Mitch McEwen of Atelier Office put in her review of the volume, “us to be aware of what we are doing and not doing in deep ways.” Easterling was de Silva’s professor (and, full disclosure, my classmate) in architecture school and it was probably not a coincidence that the book and the journal de Silva edited, Perspecta 51: Medium, shared a name.

In the talk, Easterling urged architects to move away from “geometric shapes and outlines” and look instead “at the rules and relationships that shape our space.” Easterling can be oblique in her methods—she cites rumors as an effective tool. But this morning, Easterling saw a kindred contextualist in Bawa. The architect, who graduated from the AA in London at the age of 38 before returning to Sri Lanka in 1957. Bawa is widely regarded as the father of tropical modernism, a legacy Easterling addressed: His work was “not an attempt to make the hybrid or the combination (what you see in colonial and postcolonial architecture), not the assimilated flattening. Things remain distinct and lumpy.”