Seema Malaka

The nineteenth-century hall on this site sank into Beira Lake in the 1970s, and in 1976 Bawa was asked to replace it. He did not put a building back; he put three, spread across the water on separate platforms and joined by bridges, so that the walk out to the meditation hall is part of it. The precedent he cited was not temple architecture but the forest monasteries of Anuradhapura and Ritigala — the plainest buildings in the Sinhalese tradition, made of platforms and posts. The pavilions have no walls to speak of: hipped tiled roofs on slender columns, timber balustrades, open on every side to the lake breeze, with rows of seated Buddha figures along the edges of the platforms. The reconstruction was funded by the Colombo businessman S. H. Musaji and his wife in memory of their son Ameer, and completed by 1978; the original clay tiles were later replaced with blue glazed ones.