Architecture tours of Bawa's buildings with the houses opened by their owners

A first step

Write to the owners of three Bawa buildings that are private homes or hotels and ask whether they would open for a small group once a month for a share of the ticket. Then post a single dated tour with a price in two architecture forums abroad. Tickets sold within a fortnight tell you whether to run it monthly.

Who pays first

An architect or architecture student abroad who knows Bawa's work from books and would pay to walk through the buildings with access arranged.

What leaves today

Bawa's ideas built the resorts of Asia, yet the island earns little from the people who come to study them; opened houses and paid tours change that.

The idea and the mechanism are from the book. The first step was written for this site as a suggestion; if you know a better one, say so.

The test

Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?

The only test any idea on this site has to pass. The four rules that go with it are here.

In the book

• Ch. ThreeWhat We Have Already Built
  Geoffrey Bawa's tropical modernism and the Aman resorts

More from cluster 19

• 381A film-location service: crews, permits, fixers and locations, sold to the studios of India and Europe
• 382Documentary production about the island's own stories, sold to the streaming platforms
• 383A museum shop worthy of the museum, at the National Museum, at Anuradhapura, at Galle
• 384Digitisation of the palm-leaf manuscripts and colonial archives as a paid service to the libraries of the world
• 386Heritage-building restoration firms with the skills to work on the forts and the villas
• 387A guide to everything in Sri Lanka, indexed and kept current: the places, the maps, the hotels, the courses, the makers, the trails and the seasons, published region by region, each volume written and sold from its hub

All 15 ideas in this cluster