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Minnette de Silva

Overview for Instructors

The relative obscurity of Sri Lanka’s first professionally accredited woman architect, Minnette de Silva, appears at odds with her life. The published first volume of her autobiography illuminates the extent of her vast professional and personal network. More than a third of the publication describes in detail how political conditions in Sri Lanka and the world shaped her general outlook as well as her approach to architecture. Born into a prominent family, de Silva grew up in an environment of activists who were attuned to political conditions and advocates for social change. Her father was a key figure in Sri Lanka’s movement to secure independence from British rule and later served as a cabinet minister and Member of Parliament in independent Sri Lanka, while her mother worked to advance the cause of the suffragette movement (universal suffrage was instated in Sri Lanka in 1931, making it the oldest democracy in Asia). Minnette de Silva learned to hold her own in the company of the island’s political and social elite, later making just as striking as an impression on the intellectual and professional circles she joined as a student of architecture, first in India, then in Britain. Taking a foundational role in the establishment of Indian art periodical Marg (Modern Architectural Research Group; plays on the word for road or path in several South Asian languages) for which she later served as a representative at the CIAM congresses from 1946-1957 as the only delegate from Asia. She also attended other architectural congresses through which she established longstanding professional friendships with internationally acclaimed architects and artists from Le Corbusier to Henri Cartier-Bresson, hosting the latter in Sri Lanka and traveling to India to be the former’s guest at Chandigarh.

Because there was no professional degree-granting program in Sri Lanka at the time, de Silva, was compelled to travel abroad to study. Like Justin Samarasekara (see previous section) she first attended the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay (Mumbai) in the early 1940s, but was apparently expelled after attending a rally to free Gandhi, so she apprenticed with German immigrant architect Otto Koenigsberger, and later received her degree from the Architectural Association in London. Returning to newly independent Sri Lanka in 1949 to practice, she also established collaborative relationships with modern artist George Keyt and with craftspeople in her hometown to inventively interpret local craft traditions for modern living. Aspects of her work referenced ‘canonical’ modern European architecture while playfully re-interpreting traditional Sri Lankan religious architecture for a secular middle-class lifestyle, exemplifying how the modern movement both precipitated greater global dialogue and heightened national sensibilities. While Geoffrey Bawa (next section) has been heaped with praise for his “critical regionalist” incorporation of internal courtyards, verandahs, and iconic roofs, Minnette de Silva was the originator of these ideas, even calling herself a regional modernist. And while Bawa’s politics were unvocalized and ambiguous, de Silva—like her parents before her—was candidly outspoken in her views, and threw herself into the project of a search for national cultural expression. This search was mirrored in the work of playwright EdiriweeraSarathchandra, dancers Chitrasena and Vajira, filmmaker Lester James Peiris, and the “43 Group” of artists, many of whom de Silva maintained ties with.

Reading her memoirs reveals that as a member of the elite class, she was extremely well-connected and received many early commissions through family. However, she found herself constrained by several factors, including her identity as a woman in a profession dominated by men. Apart from a few cultural facilities and low-cost housing projects, she largely undertook projects for family friends. By her own admission, convincing her clients to agree to her new ideas entailed “continual arguing, bullying and diplomacy” which she found to be exhausting. She also largely worked alone and attempted to complete all craft-related aspects of the projects as well, which added to her burden. While the sections below emphasize her built work, it is important to keep in mind that (as architectural historian AnooradhaIyer Siddiqui emphasizes) de Silva made significant intellectual contributions to the discipline of architecture as much as she experimented boldly with built form. It is worth spending time considering how de Silva’s self-published and self-edited autobiography functions as a material artefact and as a primary source. It is unusual in its scrapbook-like organization, as filled with reminiscences about her life as discussion of her built work. Like her built work, it has met with mixed reviews; some consider it a poor testament to her oeuvre, while others praise its distinctive amalgamation of the professional and the personal.

Bibliography

De Silva, Minnette. The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Colombo: Smart Media Productions, 1998.

Dissanayake, Ellen. “Minnette De Silva, Pioneer of Modern Architecture in Sri Lanka,” Orientations, vol. 13, no. 8 (August 1982), 40-51.

Iyer Siddiqi, Anooradha. “Crafting the archive: Minnette De Silva, Architecture, and History,” The Journal of Architecture, 22:8 (2017), 1299-1336.

Jazeel, Tariq. Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.

____. “Tropical Modernism/Environmental Nationalism: The Politics of Built Space in Postcolonial Sri Lanka,” Fabrications, vol. 27 (2017), 134-152.

Pinto, Shiromi. “Minnette de Silva: the brilliant female architect forgotten by history,” The Guardian, 14 December 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/dec/14/minnette-de-silva-the-brilliant-female-architect-forgotten-by-history

“Minnette De Silva: Constructive Dialogues, 2021 WDA Conference,” Princeton University.

https://vimeo.com/showcase/8840313 (4 videos)

“David Robson – Minnette de Silva: The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect,” AA Lecture, 26 April 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4JKQHLi8IU

Case Studies for Class Discussion

1/ Bricolages of the Local and the International

In her work, Minnette de Silva played off the tensions between hyper-local material and formal expressions, and a connectedness to modern technologies and techniques. Her first commissioned work for the Karunaratnes paired a concrete staircase with treads made of local jak wood; black cement risers and a black handrail showed off the balustrade in Kandyan lacquered wood painted in the traditional colors of red, gold, and black. Despite protests from the Karunaratnes, de Silva commission a mural on canvas depicting scenes from the “Hansa Jataka” (an account of one of the Gautama Buddha’s previous reincarnations) by contemporary artist George Keyt to adorn the living room wall above the staircase. Her admixing of the sacred and the secular, and of traditional and modern elements, in search of a design language suitable for independent Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) was a source of consternation at the time. The Pieris house, built for a family friend in the Colombo suburbs, contained ample parking space, as well as inner courtyards and enclosures for open-air bathing in the manner of ancient royal Sri Lankan families. The house rested on reinforced concrete columns (“pilotis”) with the first reinforced flat slab construction in Sri Lanka, but also boasted decor that included mat-paneled doors, lacquered staircase details in traditional color schemes of Kandyan lacquer-workers, and wall-perforations for holding lamps, reminiscent of the walls of Buddhist temples, or window-grilles in the shape of sacred bo leaves, as in the case of the Amerasinghe house. Her work was so new that the houses were often viewed as “unfinished” or structurally unsound, as with both the Karunaratne and Amerasinghe houses.

See also the reproduction of an article, “25 years of experiments in Modern Regional Architecture in Sri Lanka and India,” (Life and Work, 116-117) that discusses the use of columns supporting the building structure with or without enclosing walls, and movable panels, as well as considerations of regional geography and climate to modulate the boundary between indoors and outside through screens and lattices, and the reinterpretation of the room as an enclosed verandah, as in the case of the Karunaratne house and the Pieris house.(Her inclusion of internal gardens, in addition to these features, also demonstrate her interest in arriving at a suitable environmental architecture.) However, as she admits, she made mistakes in her early projects by meticulously following her training at the AA when designing for Sri Lankan conditions; designing a kitchen “by the book” for the Karunaratne house, she found that the cook had to stand on a low stool when at the sink or the counter to work comfortably.

The bricolage apparent in her built work resonates with her scrapbook-esque autobiography, embodying her position between the local and the international. In this manner, she brought a particular form of “Sri Lankan-ness” to bear on the coastal regions of Sri Lanka that may or may not have existed in the past, displacing the particularities of her Kandyan locale in the central hills in service of projects in the southwestern capital of Colombo. She also displaced forms and types traditionally reserved for religious architecture in service of a new secular and domestic architecture. In her other work, both prior and later, she displays this same dexterity in manipulating the meaning of forms, materials, and typologies, in a method that can be characterized as a bricolage of elements spanning time and space. How does de Silva’s approach compare with Bawa’s approach to tradition, and to Gunasekara’s? How does it compare with their articulated ideas of the modern?

2/ Visions for a New Urban Landscape

Apartments

  • Senanayake Apartments (1954-57). Life and Work, 272-278.
  • Scheme for Development of Land at No. 23 Horton Place (n.d.). Life and Work, 271.
  • Fernando Apartments (1956). Life and Work, 280-284.

Low-cost and Pre-fabricated Housing

  • Wickremaratna House (1953). Life and Work, 195-197.
  • C.H. Fernando House (1954). Life and Work, 198-201.
  • Cost-effective Housing Studies (1954-55). Life and Work, 190-193.
  • Sachithanandam House (1956). Life and Work, 285.
  • Watapuluwa Housing Scheme (1958). Life and Work, 207-219.
  • Dr Hensman House (1960-61). Life and Work, 285.

Minnette de Silva’s interest in the profession was kindled—by her own admission—when Oliver Weerasinghe, the island’s first town planner and a friend of her father, lent her some magazines on the subject when she was young. Throughout her life, she was to maintain a sustained interest in producing designs for the future of urban living, driven by a passion for intermediate technologies and community architecture over industrial building methods. After she was expelled from the JJ School, de Silva worked in 1944 with Otto Koenigsberger, who was serving at that time as Mysore State Architect and developing prefabricated housing designs for the Jamshedpur Development Plan. Later, during her time in London, de Silva met town planner Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, through whom she learned of the work of planner Patrick Geddes in India. While Geddes termed his approach “conservative surgery” for its insistence on retaining as much of a locale’s spatial fabric as possible in the process of development, de Silva referred to his work as “Gandhian design” (for Gandhi’s exhortation to the former to build practical housing for the poor). During her time at the AA, she completed some cost-effective housing studies informed by her small townhouse designs for the Wickramaratnes and for C.H. Fernando. As de Silva completed her course in architecture in London, her interest in urban issues deepened, but she was called home to Sri Lanka before she could embark on the planning course as well. Later, however, she produced a survey and plan of Kandy as part of a thesis for the diploma in town planning. Her studies in cost-effective housing also included considerations of airflow, and in the case of the Fernando, Sachithanandam, and Hensman houses included split-levels, internal gardens, and central stairways to encourage cross-breezes. She extended her interest in low-cost housing by investigating the use of rammed earth for housing, reaching out to J.M. Middleton, a United Nations low-cost housing advisor in the Department of Town and Country Planning, in 1955. Later, she offered occupants of her large housing scheme at Watapuluwa the option of using rammed earth. The scheme was envisioned as a co-operative endeavor, housing families of different ethnicities and economic backgrounds. Through questionnaires that gleaned information about the families, de Silva developed plans for five different house types and modular bills of quantities. Families were also able to participate in a rent-purchase scheme to acquire their houses. Cognizant of the fact that space was increasingly at a premium in Colombo, de Silva also developed designs for apartments, and the scheme for No. 23 Horton Place was a development of her ideas for the Senanayake apartments. How do her efforts compare with those of Gunasekara in producing effective low-cost housing designs?