I would like to respond to one of the points raised by Richard Murphy in his perceptive review of my book on Geoffrey Bawa (arq 7/1, pp86–88). His description of Bawa as an architect ‘in the Third World but decidedly not of it’ exercised by the fact that Bawa, like Luis Barragán, failed to address ‘pressing problems of population explosion and rapid urbanization’ in his work and that ‘with the exception of some work for the Catholic Church, Bawa's opus was built exclusively for the country's elite’.