Heritance Kandalama (Kandalama Hotel)

The client wanted the hotel next to Sigiriya. Bawa refused and moved it eleven kilometres away, which both left the monument alone and turned it into a distant view — one that the building withholds until you are inside the lobby at the end of a 2.7-kilometre private road. The hotel then does everything it can to disappear: two thin wings hooked around a cliff, a cave-like porte-cochère cut into the rock, boulders left where they stood and walked around rather than blasted, and planted slab edges that have long since covered the elevations in creeper. Inside, the section is arranged so that almost every room faces the reservoir. Built between 1992 and 1995 after a 1991 design, against protest from the monks of the Dambulla temple over the ruins on the site and from environmentalists over the tank; Bawa revised the water supply, drainage and external appearance in response. It became the first LEED-certified building outside the United States in 2000.