Documenting Geoffrey Bawa’s Kandalama Hotel in Sri Lanka proved to be very difficult. Up until this point in my education, I thought an architect was supposed to find the design elements of a building to study and understand.
While shooting Kandalama, I realized I was really studying more of the surrounding landscape features that the hotel was designed around. Bawa was a master at sustainable and environmentally responsive design before it was a “buzz word”. Getting the perfect shots of just the building was difficult because the surrounding landscape would not allow me to get far enough away from the subject. And when I was further away and trying to zoom back in, the building looked more like the surrounding landscape and was not distinguishable as a building.