In Conversation: Hirante Welandawe

The tuktuk pulls up along Bauddhalokamawatha drive, Hirante’s office is in the district of Colombo 07. Upon arriving, a short call to Melissa (Hirante’s intern), leads me to an inconspicuous timber door, well hidden in the shadows of thick foliage on the property’s front elevation. I’m being led through a brief but dark hallway before turning into an office. There, Hirante briefly discusses work with Melissa before our conversation begun proper.

HW: Discuss with him and tell me. See if they can do a different kind of bond. This is roughly what it is. The problem is that the mason says that this might topple. Not against the wall like there, bloody hell.

See the problem with architecture, there is never enough time to do our own work, just designing for other people. And I’m trying to build this garden seat.

ZA: Are you trying to build on a project of your own?

HW: Just a garden seat. I have a lovely garden, which I go if I need to think, I will go to the garden. So it’s a very important seat, where I can meditate and think about work.

ZA: And think about work?

HW: Yes that’s the whole idea, that it becomes a part of you and the work gets better. You’re studying to be an architect? It’s going to take much of your time.

ZA: Yes, it has been.

HW: Because the actual work you do on a machine, is just the labour. The real work is what goes on inside your head, and that usually doesn’t happen when you’re drawing. Like often I work here, and then I go out, and sit in bed or think in the garden with a cup of tea. And then only my mind starts functioning properly in a creative way. When you get into that kind of quiet zone. There’s a very good article on the New Yorker about it; you should read it. Its about this musician he is a prodigy and he talked exactly about this. But I think it’s the latest New Yorker. I read this yesterday, I will email it to you. He talks about, like when he writes music, he says he locks himself up in the attic and he doesn’t talk to anybody. Because he’s working and at that moment, he is just putting things together in his head, and he needs the silence to be very creative. So, it’s very important to cultivate, and you have to create the conditions for it to happen in your environment. So I’m trying to create it now with the garden. Ok so now, what do you want?

ZA: (laughter) Actually, I really just wanted to have a chat with you.

I came across the Neelung Arts Center, an found it to be a really interesting building. And I realised that there was more to it to be done.

HW: Did you go inside and see the model?

ZA: Yes, we sneaked in and the caretaker was nice enough to let us see the model.

HW: That’s really nice. The problem is that they’re a bit fussy about outsiders. It’s a dance hall. And there are a lot of paedophiles walking in the streets, as you know there are a lot of little girls walking around in their butterfly dresses. And they have had a couple of incidents where people have just walked in and asked odd questions, so the Chairperson is a little cautious to let people into the compounds. And so, the safety of the students is very important, they’re only 5-6 years old. People have come in and said they wanted to make a donation and asked if we could give them some girls for an event. You know, things like that – which all sounds a bit odd. But that’s the problem.

ZA: That building was done 10 years ago now?

HW: Yes, it was and we’re looking to begin the next phase of the building. The next important part is to get the theatre up and stage is in front of the big square where you see this small grass patch. The idea was to have a big door like a huge shutter that is in between the stage and theatre, so sometimes they do rehearsals. I wanted that activity to connect to the street. I feel like people have the knowledge of the arts, when things are going on, we of course engaged with it. We are blessed with that ability. But there are so many people at another level of our society who will never have the opportunity to engage with the arts. So, I wanted people on the street who will, never ever, think of classical music, nor think of dance, I wanted them to hear it, and listen to it and see it. So, when you make contact with that, that will create their curiosity and perhaps it will change their lives in some way. Our notion of the arts came from village culture, traditionally we have never danced in theatres and these kinds of open spaces. So, creating the whole culture of cultural activity that changes you. It must be accessible to more people. Your experience of life becomes different because of that. I am very interested in getting a second part of the building.

ZA: We were just at Lununganga two days ago and we were walking down the garden, and you could hear the village nearby, they were having a gathering and they were dancing and singing. So that was how they did as I understood from the caretaker over there was mentioning. The pavilion was very near Lunnuganga and you could hear the drums. So, there was this serendipitous public private connection.

HW: The way I read Geoffrey’s work is that it has a kind of feudal character about it. Because he’s from a, probably one or two generations before us and that was the feudal era. And then there was the independence and some search of national identity. But that kind of feudal attitude is very much there when you study his work. Channa Daswatte once told me an interesting story about Lunnuganga where he could sit in the verandah and he sees the pot and from there he also sees the temple. So, from there, he said okay I will get it painted. So, he paid the money to the temple to paint half of the stupah and the other half was left unpainted. And then they had said, Channa and all his students told him you can’t do this. It was a village temple and you couldn’t do it. But I think, he thought that maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with the way he thought because he was very much embedded in that era, and that was how anyone from that generation had thought. I mean my parents were like that, because its very hard for them to change from that. Its like a very structured class and society, and that’s how you looked at life. So, there’s nothing wrong with him saying it, but I think it’s very important part of understanding his work. I mean the parliament for instance, it’s like a medieval palace and built in a democratic era, what a huge contradiction is that.

ZA: So how has this architecture legacy informed your work, has it affected it, do you borrow it?

HW: Oh yes, I think that kind of feel of histories is embedded in the way you work. There was a very strong kind of nationalistic movement before us and them, it kind of became a kind of kitsch architecture, people were using these kind of wood columns and old verandas, but the actual meaning of it got lost somewhere and it just became fashionable symbols. I kind of reacted to that, I felt that it was in some way trivializing our work. Do you want to have a cup of tea?

ZA: Only if you have it with me. (rings for a cup of tea)

HW: So I think the part of symbols I wanted to avoid, because that had become a kind of kitsch element in our architecture but I mean like if you look at my work, most of them have courtyards, so the kind of plan form is borrowed. But of course, the way that I have incorporate these courtyards are different from a traditional building. Now this is 6m wide and 30m long (points beyond her office to the perimeter of her house). So then you can’t have the typical courtyard of an aristocratic house which they used to build, because then courtyards were 30 ft by 30ft, and you could have these beautiful verandas and what not. So now plots have become so small, so this building is two courtyards, there’s a tall one here and a short one here. (points to her house layout) Kind of a stepped courtyard thing, so I’m using the same thing but in a dif - ferent way. Because it has to fit in our current lifestyle of our current society. That you need to relate your work to the way people live now. You can’t say “Oh you are Sri Lankan, you must build with an old roof and the old wooden columns. That is why I’m very against these recycled building parts, because that has become a commodity and that has created a huge problem, because a lot of the old buildings are being recycled for parts into buildings in the city. So, the architecture becomes columns and borrowed elements which are not part of the building anymore, because people are selling them as pieces. I think I do relate to history, but I’m very conscious of replicating elements in a kind of meaningless way.

ZA: In an attempt to read your work, at the Neelung Arts Centre there was this interesting moment where you see the collection of the rainwater into the vase and then you see that against the backdrop of this concrete columns or footers that come up and interface with the timber structure. So even though it wasn’t a vernacular use of old wooden columns or these kinds now kitsch elements, it still read in the same ethos in how things came together. It was a contemporary way of interpreting the method as oppose to replication of elements.

HW: That’s really interesting way to look at it. One of the key things was the timber truss structure, because the chairperson of the Neelung Arts Centre trust was very interested in that. So our trusses are actually made out of cheap timber sections, which are called 4 x 2s. And that’s what you do when people do windows. So, by using things which are economical readily available, we were able to use a sustainable material like timber and all the cost of the building. The entire structure was actually designed by the architect and we gave the engineer this drawing. And if there were to be something wrong they would modify it. The interesting part is that they said, no, this works! So I think it’s really important for architects to think of the building as a structure, all those things have to kind of come together, then it forms a really nice relationship.

ZA: Where were you trained?

HW: I was trained by a brilliant architect, Balakrishnan Doshi. So, he was the examiner for me and another colleague of mine for our third-year project. He was the examiner for our third-year project. He had told both of us to come and work for him at his office, as trainees. Actually, at that time, we were a little vague about the whole design process. I think going to Doshi’s office really helps. There was this huge drawing of one to one of the windows of IIM Bangalore which he was working on at that time, that kind of engagement of detail and spaces, we haven’t seen it anywhere in Sri Lanka. Also living in Ahmedabad, seeing Corbusier’s works, seeing Kahn’s work. We used to cycle every day going into Louis Kahn’s building on the way to work. That one year I was there, really changed the way I looked at architecture. So, we came back completely transformed.

ZA: And after that shortly, you came back to Sri Lanka, and started practicing as your own firm?

HW: No, we still had school, so we finished two more years. So, after five years, I went to do a Masters in Helsinki at the Alvar Aalto university. I’ve been really lucky to study in two great architecture cities. I mean if you think Ahmedabad in India, and Helsinki and being part of the Alvar Aalto university as a student really kind of gives you a different sensibility. The thing is with architecture its like wine which matures over the years you know. Sometimes some small detail which you saw long ago lies somewhere deep inside – its like a seed. Then it slowly grows and suddenly you think about something and you think, “Oh my god, yes, Alvar Aalto, the space and like those things click for you.

ZA: It always seems like perpetual retrospect, where you look back and think “Hey, that’s not bad?”

HW: Yes! For me I feel like it would be very hard for me as a student to produce a really brilliant building. I think that ideas need to be inside you for a long time, and that is why you’re in contact with it, but the real consequence only dawns on you maybe 10 years later. Yes, so I think that Doshi and Helsinki is really important.

ZA: The reason why I came to Sri Lanka, is because I’m doing my final year thesis. It looks at the domain of craft, climate and capital in the architectural production in Sri Lanka. Therefore, I was curious to see how on the one hand there this rich architectural legacy, to put a sweeping statement, say tropical modernism, though I suspect there’s more to that. On the other hand you have the development of the city or the metropole, especially with the Chinese investments coming in with the port city. It would be of interest to see how these two come together in a way, does one react to the other or is it just a superimposition of the generic city unto Sri Lanka. Do you think there is room to wriggle, or resist these kinds of tall curtain wall, steel framed full height glazing towers?

HW: That is a problem. I think its not only here, but all over the world. Because development is carried 75% by the developers and developers are looking at the cheapest option, they’re not looking at the best option. Especially at that time where economy was kind of taking off, if the economy is at a different level, maybe the expenditure may be a little higher, or people will be looking at qualitative things. Right now, in the history of Colombo, people are more obsessed with quantity than quality. But that is a part of capitalism, all over the world. These capitalist economies have shifted the value system and there is an over emphasis on – when people talk they talk about how much floor area, everything is about quantity. No one will ask about quality. The group of people who want a quality driven approach is very small. The architects are working with this group. The rest of the 75-80% of the work is done by developers, with their own in-house staff. They are doing buildings, but not necessarily architecture.

ZA: During a conversation with Milinda Pathiraja earlier this week, I asked him about the development climate in Sri Lanka. He says that there are 4 major types of buildings – one was the architecture of the public, the government offices, state offices, and on the other hand you have the kind of slum, housing, where most of the population would stay, followed by a third one which are the affluence driven private residences. Within that, do architects choose, or do they try to move across?

HW: We should try to move across, but the opportunity for that is very little. Because government projects, we don’t have enough competitions – and there again they’re only looking at quantity instead of architectural quality. This is highly disappointing because important public buildings are done by the government. If architects can’t engage with that, it’s a problem for the city. I mean we are doing some apartments, that’s a kind of offbeat type of client, who still wants development but also quality. But all the mega projects are not like that, all these projects are from architects from the outside. All these architects are also the ones who are producing, buildings from cookie cutter – they all want to building quantities.

ZA: Even if in the context of Singapore, an interesting architect from overseas comes in, its not because of quality, but rather the chance for marketing or branding, to increase the value of the building. It is all subservient to the kind of capitalist modes of production.

HW: I think that is a global problem, that is kind of affecting all architects. I mean look at Donald Trump, and the whole business group. Their value system is completely different. People who think that culture is important is a highly marginalised group in every country. I think a good example is the United States now – everything is so crass, politics, business. It’s a global problem of our times. I don’t think architects can change that, it is too huge of an avalanche – the money ball is rolling. Everyone is profit, profit and profit. What is the maximum you can make out of it? Of course, there are people who try to work with this and operate in a different way. We need somehow to tap in.

ZA: It was really an eye opener to see on the first day the city growing right before your very eyes, you don’t see it in Singapore because the towers are already there and have been for a long time. Colombo seems to be at an interesting moment of spring boarding into development. You see Chinese construction sites placing their posters across the city, Chinese characters or Mandarin starts to sit beside Sinhalese characters.

HW: There are a lot of Chinese people living along this road (refers to the common road outside her house) They have businesses here and are renting these houses out. So, the city is not growing in the right direction, unfortunately the government hasn’t been able to capitalise on it favourably. If they had looked at public spaces and properly guiding development, and the whole question of high-rise buildings, where they should be. I tried to make a case, because the port city is coming up, I was working for the government as a consultant for city development. I suggested in a proposal to conserve Fort and Pettah as an entity like a conserved city and let all the towers happen in the other areas. At this moment, no one is really interested in creating legislation for that.

ZA: At the moment the towers, don’t seem to be concentrated at any given area, but rather you would see one pop out right beside a shophouse. Is there a zoning strategy happening?

HW: We had a zoning plan a long time ago but now it collapsed, because there is a kind of loophole in the regulation where if you are in a certain investment bracket and a plot size, you can renegotiate your terms. Even conservation is a big fight, right now the city is fighting to preserve slave island, but one of the developers one building. The next one is already getting ready to do it. So that is a real problem.