Snodgrass was a member of a small Traditionalist group led by Harold Stewart (1916–1995), a poet, that met in a Sydney bookshop in the 1950s, mentioned in an earlier post here and discussed in Peter Kelly, Buddha in a Bookshop (2007), for which see post here.
The article identifies Snodgrass as a Traditionalist, but does not investigate his Traditionalism beyond noting that his “exposure to these [Traditionalist] theorists provided an intellectual framework that his contemporaries, including [Alan] Gilbert and [Peter] Muller, would encounter through their friendship with him.” Gilbert and Muller, both architects, are also discussed in the article; it is not clear to what extent they were also Traditionalists. The article focuses on the travels of the three men and on their architecture.
Snodgrass traveled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1957 together with Barry Windsor (1930–1994), another Australian who was in contact with the Sydney group, and was presumably to some extent also a Traditionalist, at least in 1957. They found their way to Kataragama, a pilgrimage site for Buddhists as well as Hindus, where they joined a small Hindu group known as Kutti Kuttam (the Council of Cubs) because all its members were given animal names. Snodgrass became Punaikutti Swami (kitten) and Windsor became Narikutti Swami (young jackal). Kutti Kuttam followed Yogaswami (1872–1964), a Jaffna-born guru who had been inspired in his youth by Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902). Most of its six members were Westerners.
Windsor remained in Ceylon for the rest of his life, but Snodgrass traveled to Japan with Stewart in 1963 and joined a Pure Land Buddhist group in Kyoto connected to Bando Shojun (1932–2004), a professor at Otani University, where he was ordained a priest. He then returned to Australia in 1975, completed a PhD, and spent the rest of his life as an architect, lecturer in architecture and religious studies at the University of Sydney, and writer on Asian art. His best known book was The Symbolism of the Stupa (1985), which starts with a reference to “the traditional Indian view,” footnoted to René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Mircea Eliade. He remained a Traditionalist, then. Together with Gilbert and Muller he established Regional Design and Research, which “represented the practical application of principles that Snodgrass had explored philosophically, Gilbert had developed ethnographically, and Muller had implemented through site-specific practice.” Gilbert worked on hotel design in Hong Kong, Japan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as in mainland China. Muller's sites included the Bali Oberoi and the award-winning Amandari Resort in Bali. What these all had in common was that they provided international standards of comfort combined with distinctive local character.
The article concludes that
What began as individual journeys of discovery by emerging architects seeking alternatives to modernist orthodoxy through sustained Asian engagement evolved into a collective reconsideration of possible alternative cultural and philosophical approaches to contemporary architectural design in what was already becoming an increasingly transnational world of practice.
What evolved into this reconsideration and various architectural projects also began as Traditionalism, and passed through Hindu and Buddhist practice on the way.
This post draws also on- Glen Hill, “Vale Adrian Snodgrass 1931–2025,” Architecture, Au 23 April 2025, available here
- Ramana Hridayam, “Swami Narikutti or Barry Owen Windsor (1930-1994),” available here
- The swamis of the Saiva Siddhanta Yoga Order, The Guru Chronicles, The Making of the First American Satguru (Kapaa, Hawaii: Himalayan Academy, 2011)
