In Conversation: Milinda Pathiraja

We had first scheduled to meet with Milinda the day before, but to our dismay, we had gotten the dates wrong. On the right day of the meeting we had split up, Kate was off to Kandalama to see Laki and Zul went to speak to Milinda.

MP:What’s your program here?

ZA: Kate and I are interested in Sri Lanka as a site of choice for our architectural thesis. We’re both final year students at NUS. She’s looking at different elements in Sri Lankan architecture, looking at the tropical tropes, the column the big roof, as a kind of series of elements. My personal interest is in the modes and the methods of producing architecture, how materials come together, how its being built – examining a very specific way of building in Sri Lanka, as opposed to what we see right now near the port city, these steel and glass skyscrapers. So there are these kinds of opposing forces.

MP: So your study is about the forces and the process, and how things are put together? But how we put things together in a very specific place, and a very specific industry and how to work with the constraints and limitations of that place. I think its an interesting question. I personally feel that every project has its own context and when I say context, in other words – the physical context the landscape and what not, but also there’s the social part, the economic part, there’s a cultural context etc. So ideally each project should be different from each other because there is different situations. I think if you may have realised that Singapore is abit like us sometimes, if you would have to summarise this place into one sentence, I would say that this is a place of extremes.

You have, a beautiful landscape, the plantations and so on, but that is also existing in juxtaposition with the city full of glass and steel elements. So we have a history which runs up to 2500 years, but at the same time the history has always been bloodied by civil wars. If you look at the city there are these private gated residences that are done in certain ways, and you have business operating out of lets say more informal settings. So when you say Sri Lanka, it is very hard to construct a collective image of what that is. You have many Sri Lanka’s within one Sri Lanka. I think that is typical of us. So I’ve been practicing in Sri Lanka for about 6 years now. In that time, the kind of work that we do, we realised every project is different. I was trained in Melbourne, we had this kind of design process which was linear. More or less, it is one way of making architecture, no there are variations in that, through sketch design, detail design – all these RIBA guidelines. But here, this is not the case since everyone is designing very differently all the time.

So I think for me, since you are asking about the process, it is very hard to define one singular process. Usually as architects we try to define our niche and our way of working, the problem is, once we start to do that, we get confined to a particular way of doing work. There are architects who do some very nice houses, whereas there are others who do very nice high rises. Geoffrey Bawa himself has done some nice projects. The problem is when you go to the other end of society, buildings like housing, schools, police stations – there is very little architecture, because there, we cannot apply that process. We always don’t get the business, because to execute certain architectural intents, you would skilled carpenter or stone mason – so there is a serious issue of labour. So I think the first thing I’d like to tell you, and this is something we have been trying to do for a long time, is can an architect engage with that kind of process, where there is so much diversity in economic-socio and cultural situations. We like to use this term of robustness, as a strategy to have the capacity to adapt and be flexible.

I feel that if an architect wants to travel across the market, and dabble in different types of worlds, your design needs to be able to change and adaptable but also the process. We are building an office building in the city now, and we went through the standard process of submission drawings and tender process and everything that changes has a variation – this is perhaps how its being done in Singapore and even Melbourne. Then at the same time, we are doing this school project, where we didn’t do any drawings, because they can’t read drawings. The building is built by the parents of the school children, and they are essentially farmers. So we just worked on a few very rough sketches, and everything else is verbally communicated. So this shows the two extremes, but in between that there are so many other ways of this happening. But in this process, what we realised is that if you were to choose a position to travel across these different scenarios of operating, then your process needs to malleable.

Your drawings need to change, because the production of drawing – the purpose is to communicate the information to the people who build. So the capacity of the people who build and the capacity of the client to understand your drawing is very different. That is the first thing. It doesn’t mean that every architect has to do that. I think the practice is often a reflection of yourself and what you want to do in life and your positions about society.

So if you want to have a practice that does offices very well, or private house very well, then you could have just one way of practice and there is a market for that. The challenge is when you suddenly want to travel across, how you deal with questions of resources, materials, labour and capital. If in Colombo, I have a client who wants to build an office, I can have a wider palate of materials and can access better skilled workers. If I go to a village, where they are limited in materials, skilled labour and minimal capital. So how we organise the resources there, we have to organise it differently from elsewhere. I like to see this as an opportunity, to do something different.

For example, I’ll use the example of WOHA. If you look at the body of work, they have done different types of project, I have been to the chapel and I have been to the high rise – and they are different programs, different buildings, different clients but perhaps the process would have been more or less the same, I assume. But here, if you do that for example if you do housing, you have to engage the state builder and so on. If you build a chapel, it’s a different organisation.

ZA: Is this is a primary challenge for many local practitioners here? To take the kind of process which have been well established an taught in architecture school, from what I hear is a more sensitive and careful approach towards making buildings as oppose to operating withing the rigors of the metropole. I was speaking with Palinda about this, and he mentioned that he is always open for making a building within that domain but he will nonetheless be uncompromising in his ways of doing things. To me that was interesting, because that raises questions between approach and scale.

MP: Yes, that is why I would be inclined to change my ways to accommodate a different context. I feel that work should have a broader socio-political project. If I feel like there is an opportunity to have a contribution at a broader level, I would rather try to do that. That is where I feel that our process of design has to be broader, robust and flexible because of that. There is a danger to fall in the trap of being defined, especially in a place like Sri Lanka –there are certain areas that you may not be able to fit into. Perhaps that is a larger problem in architecture in general, because only a small portion of buildings are being designed by architects. You are talking about change in the city, the scale of the metropole – if we don’t get involved, you can’t make a statement. The way we have been taught and practice and the realities of the city are now world’s apart. I will share with you some of the work that we have done, to show you we have tried to tackle this. At the moment I do a design studio at the EPFL on a part time basis, from September to December.

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