… as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they are produced and lived contextually.

In the paper I work this argument through a critical engagement of the landscape architecture of Sri Lanka’s most famous tropical—modernist architect, Geoffrey Bawa; I specifically focus on his favorite, intensely choreographed, view at the estate Lunuganga on Sri Lanka’s south coast. As I show, while tools from the new cultural geography and beyond can help us to read this view as a classically modernist and apolitical landscape, a work of ‘art for art’s sake’, it is only a radically contextual familiarization with Sri Lankan society, politics, and history that can also reveal the landscape’s more subtle instantiation of a spatializing Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony.