Minnette de Silva


Minnette de Silva was an internationally recognised Sri Lankan architect, considered the pioneer of the modern architectural style in Sri Lanka. De Silva was a fellow of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects,
De Silva was the first Sri Lankan woman to be trained as an architect and the first Asian woman to be elected an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1948. She was also the first Asian representative of Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne in 1947 and was one of the founding members of the architectural publication Marg. She was awarded the Gold Medal for her contribution to architecture, in particular her pioneering work developing a "regional modernism for the tropics".

Early life (1918–1930)

Minnette de Silva was born on 1 February 1918 in Kandy, the second largest city of the island nation now known as Sri Lanka. The country was then called Ceylon, and had been ruled by the British Empire as a crown colony for over a century, and before that, by the Dutch and Portuguese empires. These and other European traders, sailors, and officials had settled there and given rise to a small Eurasian ethnic group of mixed descent, the Burgher people. During British rule, they occupied a highly important place in Sri Lankan social and economic life. Minette was born into one of these influential families. A recent critic wrote: "In her home country, she remained an outsider due to her mixed heritage; while in the West, her beauty and clothes served to exoticise her."
Her father was George E. de Silva, a proctor at the time of her birth, who then moved into politics. Lauded as a "champion of the poor", he served as president of the Ceylon National Congress, and as a Minister of Health. His eulogy was delivered by the sometime prime minister, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, who compared him to an early president of the United States: "In the mould of Abraham Lincolon , he was a man who travelled from the Log Cabin to White House".
Her mother was Agnes de Silva, a campaigner for women's rights and Sri Lankan independence. She was "from one of the conservative Dutch families", who opposed her union to George; the vicar refused to solemnise the marriage. The wedding was celebrated in 1909 at St. Paul's Church, Kandy by W. S. Senior, the bard of Sri Lanka. Agnes's aunt was Winifred Nell, an "outstanding pioneer woman doctor" Agnes co-founded in 1927 the Women's Franchise Union. to press for full suffrage for all women in the country. Minette de Silva also recounts that her mother’s involvement in the Arts and Crafts Movement exposed her to various traditions that are reflected in her later work as an architect.
Minette was the youngest of five children. Her sister Anil de Silva became an art critic and historian. Her brother Fredrick de Silva became a lawyer and politician, serving as Mayor of Kandy, a member of Parliament, and Ambassador to France.
De Silva was first educated at the Kandy Convent at age 7 before being transferred to the Bishop’s College Boarding School in Colombo. In 1928, her family moved to England, where she attended St. Mary's, in Brighton. On her father’s request, she returned to Ceylon in the 1930s. De Silva did not complete her formal education, due to circumstances related to her father’s financial crisis and political life, and her mother’s ailing health.
She was not able to train as an architect in Colombo, so she had to persuade her father and her maternal uncle Dr Andreas Nell to allow her to travel to Bombay to train at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art.

Education (1930–1948)

;India
As de Silva did not complete her school matriculation, equivalent to today’s Advanced Level, she had to work as an apprentice for the Bombay-based firm, Mistri and Bhedwar, where she befriended Perin Mistri and her brother Minoo. During her apprenticeship, she returned to Sri Lanka, where she attended lectures at the Ceylon Technical College. In Bombay she studied at a private academy run by G. B. Mhatres, where instructors included many influential practising architects such as Homi Billmoria, Yahya Merchant, and M. Parelkar. She also assisted Shareef Mooloobhoy on his final portfolio.
De Silva was part of the cultural and political circles which included Mulk Raj Anand and Ravi Shankar and became the architectural editor for Marg, a new publication at the time on modern art and culture. Later she enrolled at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art.
Government School of Architecture
During the time of political upheaval in India, she attended a Free Gandhi March and as a result was expelled for not writing an apology to the head of the School. She then started working as the apprentice assistant to the émigré architect and planner Otto Koenigsberger in his office in Bangalore, working on prefabricated housing for the Tata Steel City plan in Bihar. She was there for approximately seven months.
Architectural Association
During a brief visit to Ceylon, de Silva met Herwald Ramsbotham, the Governor-General of Ceylon, who took a keen interest in her situation and personally intervened in his capacity as head of the Education Committee in the UK and managed to arrange a place for her at the Architectural Association to allow her to take a special Royal Institute of British Architects examination for students returning from the war.
CIAM
De Silva was also the delegate representing India-Ceylon in the Congrès Internationaux D’Architecture Moderne from 1946 to 1957. It was here she met Le Corbusier with whom she maintained a long friendship.

Career

Early career (1948–1962)

De Silva returned to Sri Lanka in 1949 on the insistence of her father, who requested her to make her contribution to the newly independent country. She returned to her parents’ home, St. George's, where she started her architectural career without any money of her own. Although her parents would have liked her to take a reliable salaried position, she stayed in Kandy and pursued her career independently, as she had her roots there and it was the cultural and traditional centre of the nation. This was important to her as she had been brought up in an atmosphere of the patriotic political and cultural commitments of her parents to the community and the country. De Silva, who as a child lived and moved among Kandyan artists and craftsmen, was taken by her parents to see the ancient Sinhalese architecture of the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa periods. Like her parents, she was greatly influenced by Ananda Coomaraswamy, who advocated for the preservation of the traditional arts and crafts, local craftsmen and the building methods and materials, and was be one of the first Sri Lankan architects to become a patron of the local craftsmen. She develop her own style of architecture which is still apparent in the Sri Lankan architecture of today, and was one of the first architects to incorporate building knowledge acquired in the West with that of Sri Lanka and India.
Her first building was the Karunaratne House in Kandy. The 1949 commission came from friends of her parents: Algy Karunaratne, who was a lawyer, and Letty Karunaratne, who asked her to build a house for Rs 40,000. She prepared plans for a split level house for a site on a hill, the first of a kind in Kandy. It was the first building designed by a woman in Sri Lanka and attracted much attention and controversy. She had to tackle many problems early on as a result of being the first and only woman architect in Sri Lanka. The fact that she worked independently in a male dominated sector, without a male partner nor an established firm, rendered distrust of contractors, businesses, the government and architectural patrons.
After completing the Karunaratne house in 1951, the rest of the 1950s was de Silva's busiest decade throughout her career.
During this time, she was responsible for the design and materialization of projects ranging from public housing buildings to schools. Between 1950 - 1951, de Silva designed the Jinaraja College in Gampola, a tiered grade school that embraced the natural landscape of central Sri Lanka. De Silva preferred to accept the existing environment - including mountainous and sloping terrain - as opposed to appropriating and flattening it for construction purposes, in a process that blended architecture with the environment. Influenced by the natural hierarchy of the slope, De Silva placed classrooms for kindergarteners at the bottom, and senior classes at the top. The potential for expansion was also top of mind for de Silva, which she worked into her design proposal: "the scheme allowed for further development and necessary flexibility of a school building," she wrote in her memoirs. Jinaraja College serves as an exemplar for her emphasis on architectural synthesis with the natural world.
In addition to private commissions, she also explored public housing as a way to tackle the climbing costs of living, describing this movement as “a really early example of community architecture”. Determined to place primary emphasis on the “users” of the scheme, she sent out two questionnaires asking for potential residents' preference for building type, lifestyle, and economic capabilities. With the results of these surveys, she went on to develop five distinct house type plans that varied in size and cost, providing options for families. She wrote in her memoirs that this project “was really a great success” and that “there is a tremendous felicitous community spirit”.

Travels (1962–1973)

In 1962 de Silva's mother died and she subsequently suffered from bouts of ill health and depression. Throughout the 1960s she travelled, spending long periods away from Sri Lanka and allowing her practice to falter. Her career started to decline just as Geoffrey Bawa began his.
In 1960 de Silva left Sri Lanka for 5 years, calling it her period of self-renewal. She spent this time travelling in Greece, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and revisited India. After her return to Sri Lanka she was engaged in the design of a series of large tourist hotels. De Silva's work and life are discussed in Flora Samuel's book Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist.

London and Hong Kong (1973–1979)

With a change in government in Sri Lanka in the 1970s, de Silva and many others of the same outlook felt uncomfortable with the Bandaranaike government. In 1973 she closed her office and moved to London, renting a flat on Baker Street from Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. While in London she wrote the whole section on South Asian architecture in the new edition of Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture.
De Silva's work on A History of Architecture opened the doors for her to join the Department of Architecture, at the University of Hong Kong, where she was appointed lecturer in the History of Asian Architecture. She stayed in Hong Kong from 1975 to 1979 and pioneered a new way to teach the history of architecture in an Asian context. During this period she curated an exhibition that was shown at the Commonwealth Institute in London with the large collection of photographs of vernacular Asian architecture she had amassed. De Silva also had plans to write her own comprehensive history of Asian architecture for the Athlone Press; however this came to nothing.

Back in Kandy (1979–1998)

Upon her return to Kandy in 1979, de Silva tried to revive what was left of her architectural practice, but had difficulty in recruiting experienced staff. This was the last phase of her architectural career and she went on to complete only three more buildings. In 1982 de Silva settled down to work on the Kandy Art Association and Centenary Culture Centre in her hometown. The centre was designed with many levelled Kandyan flat tiled roofs and symbiotic indigenous features: thorana, midulas, mandapas, rangahala, and avanhala.
The centre was designed as a large interactive space where a number of activities could take place with a strong symbiotic relationship of architecture and entertainment. The excavated area to the rear formed a natural amphitheatre, and the 150-year-old building adjoining the site became a focus of the new design. A Kandyan village setting with trees and plants was a pleasing foil to the Temple of the Tooth and the Malwatta Vihara. De Silva willed the art centre to be the most characteristic and living illustration in the region of contemporary Kandyan architecture.

Death

De Silva died after falling from her bathtub at home in the Frazer Memorial Ward of Kandy Hospital on 24 November 1998, at the age of 80. Her family spread her ashes in the Mahaweli River.

Legacy

In 1996, two years before her death, and after being largely ignored during much of her career, de Silva was awarded the Gold Medal by the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects.
The closest thing she published to an account of her life was "a charmingly illustrated ‘scrapbook’ autobiography", The Life and Works of an Asian Woman Architect - unedited, published posthumously, and incomplete.
She is considered to be one of the thinkers behind critical regionalism, an approach which seeks to provide an architecture rooted in the modern tradition, but tied to geographical and cultural context. She called it Modern Regionalist Architecture, a way of design that takes into consideration the social and material needs of poor countries, by using locally available material, for example, to reduce building costs. Her design methodology was innovative in including participation and consultation.
De Silva’s architecture also engaged with landscape, climate, and material-ecology — not as an add-on, but as integral to her design logic. Her work weaved together the terrain, vegetation, climate, materials and craft in ways that challenged a generic, placeless modernism. In emphasising climate response, de Silva’s work was an early version of what later came to be known as “tropical modernism”, a modern architecture that is regionally rooted rather than transplanted. For her, ecology was not merely environmental in a technical sense, but cultural, social, material and spatial.
De Silva adapted modernist structural techniques but modified them for tropical conditions: e.g., large overhangs, deep loggias, verandas, open plans, cross-ventilation, movable screens. She rejected the “International Style” approach of glass box in favour of forms responsive to sun, rain, and wind. The building becomes a device for controlling climate rather than resisting it. For example, her use of pilotis raises building off ground for air circulation; loggias wrap façades to provide shade; courtyards act as thermal regulators.
From a material perspective, de Silva's designs integrated machined architectural elements, such as concrete mixed and cast in the style of beton brut with organic ones such as flowering plants, grasses, soils, and rock. Her material compositions conflated the interior and exterior of buildings. Examples include exterior window frame elements on the interior of a building, open-air interior rooms, and intimate exterior spaces, reflecting her evocative understandings of the urban enclaves of Colombo and the cross-section of the hill country of Kandy.
De Silva developed the design strategies of these early projects in each of her built works over the course of her career, inviting movement through the cross section of a site and sequencing the promenade to anchor and articulate that movement, creating haptic experiences of thresholds and vistas, constructing spatially distinct moments with architecturally framed views, and mobilising dynamic relationships between materials. With these methods, she attempted to deepen the inhabitants' engagement with the constructed landscape. It highlighted that in a post-colonial context, the landscape and climate are not constraints to be overcome but assets to be incorporated. De Silva turned the tropical challenge into a design virtue.
Building on the revivalist efforts launched by her parents' generation, de Silva worked with impoverished crafts-based communities around Kandy and actively engaged in crafts production including handloom weaving, mat weaving and wood lacquering. The incorporation of traditional crafts elements in the Karunaratne House, her first independent project, became a recurring theme in other architectural projects throughout her life. By cohering craftsmanship and the fine arts, de Silva remarkably imbricated local heritage with architecture of the present day.
During South Asian Heritage Month, the British architect Sumita Singha OBE summed up the achievements of de Silva:

List of works

Most of her 40 works have been demolished or altered and archives lost.
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;1950s
;1960s
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;1990s