Tag: Yashodhara Ranasinghe

Architecture, not necessarily emerge spontaneously, instead can be evolved as a problem-solving process even for a small, personalized house. “The homestay”, was designed by connecting small scale, non-designed two existing units located in the same site at Ahangama, and now celebrate the serenity of living in collective personalized spaces under one roof.

As the case for several preceding community projects done by the Robust Architecture Workshop, this project aims a rural context in terms of facilitating knowledge, in this case a primary school in Boralukanda. The knowledge of building was transferred to build a building where universal knowledge is kept and preserved. The school now owns a ‘New Library’, after decades of functioning without a proper library building, and the community by themselves built the school library along with the immense support and guidance by RAW the Architects. The context specific natural, capital and human resources has been taken in to serious consideration by the Architects in the process of design and construction, and after all, the whole community is benefitted by gaining the capacity (skills and knowledge) of handling and leading similar circumstances in future.

In October 2014, a huge landslide struck Sri Lanka in the district of Badulla- a hilly region, which caused many fatalities and left people missing forever. This lead to a whole community of line-house dwellers being flushed away and buried by dawn, while some victims were still sleeping. It became Sri Lanka’s second largest natural disaster; the first being the Tsunami, within recent history. The Meeriyabedda tea estate disappeared from the geographical map and people who were displaced were retained in schools that served as temporary camps. By 2015 they are still in the same camps as there is nowhere to go and no resettlement plans are being implemented. However, the government has begun planning for a resettlement program for these people and to launch it in a massive scale throughout the whole tea estate labor sector.