Making, Methods & Materials: Curious Case of Sudesh and his Workers

“In craft we trust, in construction, we trust blindly” - Author

In Sri Lanka, a craftsman that is concerned with producing a building is referred to as a baas. The baas is someone who specialises in a specific craft discipline and is often employed by clients, architects or construction companies to do specific architectural features or details.

In Sri Lanka today, there are local basses all over the country that support their area’s building industry. In the southern part of Colombo, in a place called Moratuwa, Sudesh, a local craftsman specialising in the carving of timber framed windows are one of the many craftsman that have continually supported the building industry in his hometown by providing carpentry services. He operates from a small workshop not more than 30 square meters in size, with a small group of apprentices that cut and carve under his watchful eye. He passes down the techniques he had learned from his father unto his young apprentices through training and repetition of gestures. Sometimes, he provides for projects in the city of Colombo. These days it seems, the demand for crafted timber window frames for the city has waned, as urban construction techniques that warrant speed and efficiency, have found substitutes in the form of powder coated aluminium modular window frames.

Labour for construction sites, were usually dependent on the scope and scale of the buildings. Villas of a larger scale saw ‘gentlemen contracting firms employed highly skilled basses or craftsman for carpentry work. Rajendran used to be one of these carpenters. A big shift in construction processes that required manual labour of the hand occurred when concrete mixing trucks and hollow concrete blocks were introduced, eradicating the need for informal labour mixing concrete and laying the aggregate. Soon Rajendran’s timber craft will soon have the fate of being replaced, just as concrete blocks replaced manual casting. (Pieris, 2017)

Products and Processes: State of Affairs & The Construction of Urban Vernacular

Current day Sri Lanka, the notion of ‘pure’ craft is under the threat of the speed of urban vernacular developments. The Sri Lankans, have had to catch up with the speed of the development of the city. The rich architectural legacy of Bawa and his colleagues warrant a kind of patience in crafting a building. Elements of buildings are crafted, master builders in constant conversation with the architect - making the practice of architecture a slow one. In the meantime, developments of the city has left behind this domain of architecture that requires excess capital and time, and the hence the rise of urban vernacular shells and buildings designed and built by the state.

In downtown Colombo, a slew of concrete shells are being constructed everyday by a labour force of both skilled and unskilled backgrounds. Some have had proper training under years of experience with construction companies, others under apprenticeship with local builders while a large part of the labour force are first time workers on site. With much of the labour force of Sri Lanka deployed abroad in the Gulf states, the diaspora of this skilled labour has left a gap in the construction industry on the island. As Sri Lanka comes out of militarization of civil war, its capital city quickly developed into one of the fastest growing cities in the world. In 2015, Mastercard Global Destination Index rated Colombo as the fastest growing city in the world. A large part of this development owes to both the boom in tourism industry and the drastic inflow of Chinese capital. (Daily Mirror, 2018) The shortage in skilled labour has perpetuated the dismal quality of buildings in the city.

As a result of the growing metropole, spawns a thriving local industry of building products. From Square Hollow Sections (SHS) to custom steel extrusions, local workshops have turned to making these building products to supply the construction market of downtown Colombo. Many of these workshops can be found on the fringes of the city. Aside from local material workshops, many building junkyards can also be found in the outskirts of Colombo, near a place called Moratuwa. These are treasure troves of recycled building parts, decorated timber columns, beams, and timber framed windows. Outside of the city, many houses along the coast make use of these recycled building parts in ingenious ways. A dedicated industry of pre cast concrete rafters, balustrades and recycling of doors from colonial buildings, closed the gap of the lack of skilled craftsmen, which today has a massive diaspora in the Middle East.

Albeit the uncanny beauty that is of the urban vernacular, issues of labour, especially that of skilled labour still remain at large; an issue that has been relegated to the backburner of the state. One of the few practitioners that is critically addressing at the current modus operandi of construction in Sri Lanka in an optimistic manner is Milinda Pathiraja.

Founder of Robust Architecture Workshop, Milinda, designed a Post war collective library that resolved issues of skilled labour in construction in a profound yet simple way, the method of construction was staggered and a means to teach skills to the ex army personnel who were the labourers. The building would be built step by step, beginning with simple construction of flushed concrete walls to advanced methods of casting. By teaching the basics, through to complex details, the value and agency of the architectural proposition was that it imparted knowledge and skills, effectively training unskilled individuals to skilled labourers.

Is this direct method of making a building as a means to address contemporary issues such as labour a way Sri Lankan’s can build with the Chinese? Can craft be taught to the Chinese?

Chinese Construction

Chinese Communications Company and China Harbor Engineering Company are two of the biggest construction bodies that currently have a massive presence on the island. The portfolio of construction projects that have been awarded to the Chinese companies have led to some bitter sentiments by the locals. Of recent times, the Ceylon Institute of Builders, the island’s own consolidated construction body, have resorted to signing a memorandum of understanding with the China International Contractors Association to ‘share’ projects, in the hopes of a increased Sri Lankan stake in the participation in the construction market. (Global Construction Review, 2018)

The irony in the Chinese-centric awarding of tenders is that the projects are often borne out of investments made by the very same companies. These companies would then deploy Chinese labour, construction materials to construct a building that is financed by the Chinese, in the circumstance of debt to Sri Lanka. The capital of construction comes back full circle to the mainland it seems. (Reuters, 2018)

Cultural Strata and Notions of Early Capital

From very early on the notion of cultural strata had been well established in the Sinhalese culture. In the Kandy and Kotte kingdoms, caste systems were inextricably tied to individuals’ roles or profession in society. When colonialism came into the island, a clear stratification between the British and the locals was quickly established.

By the early twentieth century, Michael Roberts noted that Colombo had grown to be a “primate city,” the center of political and financial deals within the island, its principal port, and an arena for display. The groups that predominated in the colonial city were the British residents, the Burghers (descendants of Dutch and Portuguese colonists) and elite families from indigenous ethnic communities. (Colombo

Telegraph, 2014)

The western ideals were indeed aspirational. Locals had a deep desire to live the western lifestyle. Bevis Bawa, popular social columnist of the post-independence era and not so coincidentally Geoffrey Bawa’s brother who also practised landscape architecture, reflected sarcastically:

“The last generation were magnificent in their grandeur. They memorized the facades of vast houses they saw all over Europe, returned and built them on acres of land they or their fathers had owned in the city. Houses like Gothic churches, Victorian wedding cakes. There was no question of being nationalistic in those days. Most people were for the ways of the West and some secretly wished they were from it.” (Pieris, 2017)

A small group of cultured Burger gentlemen conceived of an anticolonial Ceylonese identity influencing the westernized Indigenous elites. Nationalism was, paradoxically, nurtured amidst conflicting Western aspirations. These negotiations of identity manifested in private institutions such as the Orient Club which excluded Europeans. The challenges to colonial authority by the local elite were facilitated by the liberal values learned via education in Britain. (Pieris, 2017)

Capital on the island belonged to the a small group of upper class, commissioning projects such as the Bagatalle House in Cinnamon Gardens and the Lakshmigiri house. These houses were not only big in its footprint, but heavily referenced colonial bungalows back in the United Kingdom. The rest of the island it seems comprised of dwellings in the form of the basic de Soysa Walawwa, a large residence that was made simply, comprising of a courtyard and a verandah. These were simple structures that were inexpensive to build and inhabit. (Pieris, 2017)

Capital Brackets: Architectural Archetypes

Today on the island there seems to be the emergence of various sources of capital when translated into built form, there seems to be four predominant archetypes. Expediency driven, profit driven, state driven and affluence driven types. (Pathiraja, 2018) These four archetypes have been well established since the island state gained independence from its colonial masters.Today, however, we begin to see the emergence of a new archetype, one that is originates from the Chinese. With projects across the island, as far up as Jaffna, suspiciously close to India, the Chinese are coming in a big way.

The Chinese are Coming

The relationship between the Chinese and Sri Lankans is not a uniquely new one, but one that has been crafted over the years. Curiously, the relationship between the two date back to early 14th century, through the military figure of Zheng He when he had first interfered with the civil war of that time between the Kingdom of Kotte and Jaffna.

In modern times, through the years, the capital brought forth from the Chinese have come in the form of both grants and loans for a variety of purposes. As of 2012, China was Sri Lanka’s largest bilateral (country to country) creditor, displacing Japan. Since 1997, the island state has borrowed around USD2.96 billion from China. Interest ballooning however, has led to accrued debt of USD4.9 billion which have to be repaid on average within 12 years from borrowing. More recently, two major projects in the country, the Hambantota Port and the Colombo Port City, has left a deepening debt trap. This major dent in the Sri Lanka’s balance sheet, results in a lop-sided dynamic in Chinese-Sri Lankan relations.

Yet, the plot seems to thicken. Historical materialism, it seems, trumps everything: “there is no power on earth that can stand in the way of intrinsic material forces.” This is indeed the case with our Sri Lankan and Chinese friends. Over the years, the Chinese have gifted Sri Lanka with many things. Public buildings, grants for infrastructure, armament aid for civil conflict just to name a few. The Chinese foreign policy in diplomacy is a long and patient strategy, it could be akin to a Bonsai Tree. In Planting a Bonsai Tree of sorts, the BMICH, a conference hall for the memory of the fourth prime minister of Sri Lanka, was a gift from the Chinese and built in the 1970s with a combined labour force from China and Sri Lanka.

40 years on, the building has served multifaceted role in cultural production between Sri lanka and China - from conferences, shared events, cultural exchanges. The building, in many ways, perfectly captures the dynamic between Sri Lanka and China, a friendship that is bounded by capital through the means of built form, and transplanted sino-modernism that employs the use of Chinese building materials and processes.