Geoffrey Bawa (1919–2003) was Sri Lanka’s most celebrated architect in the 20th century and his half-a-century long career shaped the nation’s visage to the world, even as Bawa’s ludic and polystylistic architectural innovations sat uneasily with Sri Lanka’s majoritarianism grown increasingly strident after independence in 1948. This paper examines Bawa’s architectural sites as “visual texts” that exhibit a fraught, fractious engagement with the dominant nationalism of his times.