Laki Senanayake

A drawing of a double coconut palm, made at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Peradeniya, hangs today over the main chamber of Sri Lanka’s Parliament, cast in metal and grown to the scale of a room. The man who drew it, Laki Senanayake, spent his working life turning lines on paper into things a person could stand beneath, and he did it first as the draughtsman whose hand lay behind some of the most admired buildings on the island.

He was born on 18 December 1937 and drew from early on. By his own account he lost an early post in an architect’s office for organising his fellow workers into a union, and it was Geoffrey Bawa who then took him on. From 1959 he was at the Colombo firm Edwards, Reid and Begg, working beside Ulrik Plesner and the young Bawa, and from 1963 onward he modelled and drew the sculptural detail for very nearly every building Bawa designed. The debt ran both ways: where Bawa raised the walls, Senanayake filled them, so that the architecture and the art of the island’s finest modern houses and hotels came from a single circle of friends.

That circle was itself a kind of workshop. In the mid-1960s he joined Barbara Sansoni, Ulrik Plesner and Ismeth Raheem in a long effort to measure and record the island’s fast-disappearing vernacular buildings, the archive Sansoni and Ronald Lewcock would later publish as ‘The Architecture of an Island’. He had helped Ena de Silva start a batik firm in 1960. He designed several of the country’s currency notes at the end of the 1970s, and made a bronze Bodhi leaf for the Sri Lankan pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka.

The work that carried his name, though, was the sculpture, most of it in brass, aluminium and lead. The great brass owl he made for the Kandalama Hotel in 1994, and the coco de mer chandelier raised over the Parliament chamber when the complex opened in 1982, took the exactness of the draughtsman’s line and gave it weight and shadow. He worked across a startling range, from the realistic to the abstract, and thought of himself as artist, sculptor, gardener and inventor at once, resisting any single trade.

In his later years he withdrew to Diyabubula, a water garden he made near Dambulla, and lived among the trees, the ponds and the creatures he had drawn all his life. He died there on 30 May 2021. The draughtsman who had given other men’s buildings their finishing hand had, at the last, built a place of his own and let the wild come into it.