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The book reflects on how over the past 35 years, Vijitha Basnayaka and his collaborators have created buildings of immense poetic appeal, supported by a choreographic mastery of space and form, true commitment to environmentally sensitive design, and a unique insight into local building production traditions.

Basnayaka’s buildings are genuinely space-specific in their form and meaning, refreshingly candid in their environmental and cultural ethos and masterfully poetic in their spatial and experiential narratives. His work is an outcome of life-long research on the spontaneous qualities of the vernacular space and tectonics, the disciplinary interpretations of tradition and modernity, and the discursive overlapping between art and architecture.

Trained entirely in Sri Lanka, Basnayaka’s work offers an alternative perspective to post-colonial architecture in the South Asian region, through a practice of building that values the process as much as the product.