‘Geoffrey Bawa is the greatest architect no one has ever heard of. He has influenced generations of architects like Tadao Ando and Kerry Hill, but no one outside architectural circles know just how influential he is,’ says Afdhel Aziz, a blunt assessment he hopes to rectify with his new documentary, The Genius of the Place: The Life and Work of Geoffrey Bawa, which premieres in Sri Lanka on 15 July 2023.
Filmed entirely on location in December 2022 – many of the scenes shot with a drone giving Bawa’s projects a gratifyingly fresh perspective – the 74-minute film is a long overdue cinematic paean to the Sri Lankan architect’s outsized talent and his fabled sensitivity to the terrain.
