A virtual reality walk-through Lunuganga among the work of filmmaker cum architect
For Clara Kraft Isono, her first glimpses of Lunuganga were in a black and white coffee table book, where as she flipped the pages she was transported to a world of wonder; the faraway brooding antique Dutch doors opening to the ‘Plain of Jars’, Greek statues poised against Bentota lake and frangipani, and all that harmony where the old Sinhala vernacular mixed with other influences from many lands and times…
It was years later that the filmmaker, architect and academic was able to visit Geoffrey Bawa’s famed garden, and that time the experience was enlivened with birdcall and more atmosphere. Thus was born her ‘Garden as a Cloud’, the poetic name given to the immersive Virtual Reality walk-through of the garden, now open to view at the exhibition ‘Ways of Knowing’ at the Geoffrey Bawa Space down Horton Place.
Lunuganga: Through a virtual reality lens
‘Garden as a Cloud’ comes after Clara’s 2022 film ‘Bawa’s Garden’, for which she gathered so much on Lunuganga. But what struck her most was the fragility of the landscape and the constant care it requires. “Climate change has a huge impact on it: as a fast-growing tropical garden, it needs continual pruning and cutting back to remain close to the image Geoffrey Bawa imagined, yet nature can never be fully tamed, and that balance of control and surrender was at the heart of Bawa’s philosophy.”
Clara herself suggested the virtual reality walk-through to the Bawa Trust for the 75th anniversary of the garden. In 2023 they spent five days scanning every part of the garden, “from the largest tree to the smallest leaf”, creating a detailed digital model that will now exist for generations to study.
Clara is primarily a filmmaker but also an architect. Consequently, her films give paramount importance to the spatial element.
Clara Kraft Isono
UK-based, she has a Film by Practice PhD from the University of Exeter, a Masters in Filmmaking from the London Film School, as well as a Postgraduate Diploma in Architecture from the Architectural Association and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Royal College of Art, where she runs the interdisciplinary film and architecture design studio, ADS6.
For Clara space is everything. Each place and landscape has its charm: from Granada in Spain with its Arabic touches “in architecture as well as agriculture”’; to Tokyo with “the dense, ever-evolving urban fabric, a metropolis where even the smallest corners carry stories within a constantly shifting whole”.
Clara’s films are so atmospheric of beautiful spaces, they act like a salve. She says, “I strongly believe that architecture can have a deeply healing impact. Good architecture, in a way, helps us to ‘find’ ourselves. Similarly, film can profoundly shape how we see and encounter the world. Both are forms of refuge, spaces where we can step back from the constant barrage of our busy lives.
“One of the ways they do this is by shifting our perception of time. A building is as much an instrument of time as it is of space. It can slow us down, invite us to pause, or allow us to experience time differently. In my film ‘Garden as a Cloud’, for example, the audience is invited to suspend disbelief and let the immersive virtual reality of the garden exist in another dimension, in another rhythm of time.
“I consciously try to build this sense of timelessness into all of my work, whether in film or through the spaces I engage with. The aim is to invite the spectator to let their body and mind fall into a place with its own measure of time, and, through that, discover a new way of experiencing space.”
“I construct my films much like I would a building: I think about how you enter, what you first encounter, and the sequence of spaces I want the spectator to move through. A film, for me, is always a deeply spatial experience. In my teaching and research, I carry this further by asking how film can expand our understanding of architecture. What does this form of representation reveal about space, not only in terms of recording or documenting it, but also in terms of designing it?
“In that sense, film becomes a tool for architectural inquiry as much as it is a creative practice in itself.”
Ways of Knowing, the exhibition of which Garden as a Cloud is a part, will be on view at the Bawa Space, 42/1 Horton Place, Colombo 7 till February 28, 2026, from Thursday to Sunday.
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