Paradise found.

Geoffrey Bawa's latest tourist hotel, deep in the Sri Lankan interior, enables visitors to experience the delights of tropical landscape and archaeology yet (unlike many luxury hotels) treats its magnificent setting with great delicacy.

Architects, like actors, are always in danger of being typecast. By now we know what a Geoffrey Bawa building ought to look like: a great sheltering roof, a hint of a heightened vernacular, a series of felicitous incidents that are part of an architectural promenade. Articles in The Architectural Review and the book by Brian Brace Taylor - just issued in paperback in a revised edition - have made us familiar with images of an architecture set in a tropical idyll.(1) Yet here is a flat-roofed building with, at least superficially, an almost Miesian black frame. What has gone wrong?

The answer, of course, is nothing. What is wrong is our expectation. We mistake solutions appropriate to certain conditions with the belief that these are somehow general and inevitable. Most of the buildings by Geoffrey Bawa that we know are on the west coast of Sri Lanka, in Bali or Mauritius. These are all areas of heavy tropical rainfall. The Kandalama Hotel at Dambulla is very much inland and in a dry zone which for 2000 years has relied on irrigation. One of the early great tanks (reservoirs built to hold water from the brief monsoon) stretches out in front of the hotel and, together with a dramatic rock outcrop, determines its location.

What we see, therefore, is a wholly appropriate response to a different situation: the design of a hotel complex in the dry-zone jungle with a distant view of Sigiriya, the most dramatic rock drum to be found in Sri Lanka. The ruins of a palace crown the plateau on top and those of a garden are at its base. Halfway up, reached by steel walkways and steps, are the remains of a mural depicting alluringly full-bosomed ladies of the Court. By the eighth century AD they were already the subject of graffiti on a nearby wall. The rock and its surroundings are one of the important archeological sites of the country and hence the need for a tourist hotel.

That need was vociferously contested and acrimoniously debated for reasons of national politics as well as a respectable concern for the fragility of the local environment. But perhaps the underlying issue was that the spread of tourism needs to be halted and that if there were to be any tourism it should encourage young people with haversacks to walk through the jungle, sleep in palm frond huts and spend very little. However laudable that aim may be, it does hardly anything for the Sri Lankan economy and probably even less to preserve the jungle. Paradoxical as it may seem, the tourist island is likely to be the most benign solution for most rural localities, both as regards their population and their fauna and flora.

Kandalama was only built after the most extended environmental impact assessment had been carried out and the Government's Central Environmental Authority was satisfied that all its demands had been met. The most critical aspects related to water and sewage. The hotel complex has its own sewage treatment and disposal plant. This has now been made mandatory for all new hotels. Water is taken from wells and returned to the ground by using treated waste water for the irrigation of the gardens. No water is taken from the reservoir, which is now fed throughout the year by the Mahaweli irrigation project and which in turn supplies 15 000 acres of agricultural land. The reservoir is a great surface of water with a few islands and some tree skeletons rising out of it, survivors of the time when the reservoir was breached and before it was repaired in the late 1940s. Looking from the far side of the reservoir at the hill and rock face in front of which the hotel stands, very little building can be seen. The irregular plan, the black frame, the absence of a sloping roof and the vegetation that grows at every level including the roof, blur the building into the landscape. Bawa and his clients first came to the area by car in May 1991 and shortly afterwards flew in a helicopter around the reservoir. The jungle slope in front of a near vertical grey rock face tall enough to ensure that the building would never be seen as a silhouette against the sky, seemed to Bawa the inevitable site. All subsequent construction has vindicated that first decision. It is virtually impossible to see the building as a whole. The 150 bedrooms are like a piece of folded card that has been angled to make it stand up; in fact the angles follow the line of the rock face at the rear. At the centre there is the entrance and from this stem two wings, one oriented towards Sigiriya, the other towards Dambulla.

The road rises from the fields at reservoir level, making a sharp bend buttressed by great stone retaining walls. The entrance is a wide, totally open mouth of a 'cave'; perhaps an echo of some early jungle dwelling. From there, a narrow winding rock-lined tunnel leads to the first sitting area, open to the wide landscape, and then to the rest of the hotel.

In most hotels, however luxurious, the journey to one's bedroom is less than fascinating. At Kandalama one walks in the open on what seems a wide terrace that twists and turns, that occasionally widens to make room for some chairs or perhaps an old writing desk, and which is always partially enclosed by trees and the nearby rock face. At no time is the landscape left behind.

Each bedroom is reached from this walkway and reveals the opposite view; first some small-scale vegetation on the rough wooden framework between the black concrete frame, then trees and the great expanse of water and eventually an outline of hills in the far distance. Frank Lloyd Wright's dictum 'do not build in the view but with a view' is entirely fulfilled. Even from the bathroom - on the face of the building and not buried internally - the whole panorama is here to be enjoyed. The immediacy of being surrounded by nature, of being part of the tropical idyll, is everywhere present.

The materials are highly robust and sometimes outside Bawa's accustomed palette. The windows are of anodised aluminium, partly because of the climate and partly to protect the resources of the tropical rainforest. There is a great deal of stone and concrete and the projecting ledges for planting are made from the branches of rubber trees for which there is no commercial use. Floors in public rooms are stone or tiles cool underfoot, occasionally wood strip. Despite extremely simple, virtually standard detailing, the contractor's workmanship is in many places sadly deficient. The available technology of waterproofing, moreover, does not appear to have come up to expectation. Sri Lanka's construction industry must become capable of dealing with projects of this size if big contracts such as Bawa's Parliament group or the University at Ruhunu are not to be built by foreign contractors.

What are not in any way missing are the felicitous incidents that are so characteristic of Bawa's architecture. They punctuate any walk through the hotel and its grounds. It is sometimes forgotten that Bawa is as interested in the design of gardens as buildings, or to put it perhaps more accurately, that he sees the two as an inseparable continuity. His own garden at Lunuganga on which he has worked for years has been wonderfully documented.(2)

The incidents occur also at a scale that allows the visitor to engage very directly: a rock outcrop in one of the lounges as background to huge wooden elephants with large wheels - half animal, half chariot - created by Ena de Silva; an owl sculpture by Laki Senanayake that hovers over the main stair open on one side to the jungle and the reservoir, allowing, as it were, the bird to fly in; the unexpected solidity of the bedroom door; the abstract brass house that sits on a piece of modified balustrade or the way an old ironwood beam salvaged from a house in Colombo has been turned into the top of the reception desk. Behind each action there is a touch of wit which seems wholly right for a hotel and which perhaps forms part of the recollection a visitor takes home.

Outside the gestures are broader: an upper pool discharges through a gargoyle on to a rock face; the water runs down the wet rock to the lower main pool which has an overflow that is its entire width, the edge of water merging with the water of the reservoir way below; a visual conceit that never fails to raise a smile. But probably the most cunning gesture is the way the hotel is raised clear of the ground over most of its length. The earth, vegetation and the water-courses continue uninterrupted below the building; a gesture which is not only visually rewarding but is also entirely in keeping with the policy of interfering as little as possible with the existing jungle.

The Kandalama Hotel is a landmark in every sense except the literal. A building inconspicuous in the landscape, yet from within totally dominated by that landscape, making everyone feel in contact with a great panorama of nature changing during the day and night and during the seasons. It is a tourist complex that offers every visitor the reality of a tropical dream yet treats its setting with deep consideration.

1 Brawne, Michael, 'The Work of Geoffrey Bawa' AR August 1978; 'University of Ruhunu, Matara' AR November 1986; Brawne, Michael From Idea to Building Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 1992; Scott, Rupert 'Two Bawa' AR May 1983; Taylor, Brian Brace Geoffrey Bawa Thames & Hudson, London, 1995.

2 Bawa, Geoffrey; Bon, Christoph & Sansoni, Dominic Lunuganga Times Editions, Singapore, 1990.