Minnette de Silva

Minnette de Silva (Sinhala: මිනට් ද සිල්වා;Tamil: மினிட் டி சில்வா; 1 February 1918 – 24 November 1998) was an internationally recognised architect, considered the pioneer of the modern architectural style in Sri Lanka. De Silva was a fellow of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects (SLIA),
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 (RIBA) in 1948. She was also the first Asian representative of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) in 1947 and was one of the founding members of the architectural publication Marg. She was awarded the SLIA Gold Medal for her contribution to architecture, in particular her pioneering work developing a 'regional modernism for the tropics'.
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 Britain 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 criminal barrister (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 own father had been an Ayurvedic physician). His eulogy was delivered by none other than 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 [sic], he was a man who travelled from the Log Cabin to White House".
Her mother was Agnes de Silva (née Nell), 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 --- indeed, 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. The aunt of Agnes was Winifred Nell, an "outstanding pioneer woman doctor" Agnes co-founded in 1927 the Women's Franchise Union. to press for full suffrage (voting rights) 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 attemded 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 (1864-1956) to allow her to travel to Bombay to train at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art.
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.
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 returning students for the War.
CIAM
de Silva was also the delegate representing India-Ceylon in the Congrès Internationaux D’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) from 1946 to 1957. It was here where she met Le Corbusier whom she maintained a long friendship with.
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 would start 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 would be 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 would be one of the first Sri Lankan architects to become a patron of the local craftsmen. She would develop her own style of architecture which is still apparent in the Sri Lankan architecture of today, and would be one of the first architects to incorporate building knowledge acquired in the West with that of Sri Lanka and India.
Her first building would be the Karunaratne House in Kandy. The 1949 commission came from friends of her parents Algy, 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 would be de Silva's busiest decade throughout her career.
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.
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 (18th) 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 would stay 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.
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 would be the last phase of her architectural career but would only go on to complete three 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 (gateways), midulas (open courts), mandapas (pavilions), rangahala (space for dance and music), avanhala (refectory).
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 (residence of the high priest of the sect). De Silva willed the Art Centre to be the most characteristic and living illustration in the region of a contemporary Kandyan Architecture.
Having always been plagued by financial insecurity, de Silva died penniless in a hospital in Kandy on 24 November 1998 at the age of 80. She had fallen from her bathtub at home, and was not found for days.
In 1996, two years before her death, 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 to a memoir she published 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.
Plastic Emotions, by Shiromi Pinto, is a 2019 novel based on the life de Silva, particularly her relationship with Le Corbusier. The book was reviewed, and de Silva's life and work brought to a larger public, in publications such as the Architectural Review (2019), the RIBA Journal, and Elle Decor.
During South Asian Heritage Month, the British architect Sumita Singha OBE sums up the achievements of de Silva:
"Most of her 40 works have been demolished or altered and archives lost."