De Silva was born between 1916 and 1918 into a Burgher/Sinhalese family and died in 1998, just one week before the first (planned as two) volume of her autobiography “The Life & Work of an Asian Woman Architect” was published. She was the first Sri Lankan woman to be trained as an architect and the first Asian woman to be elected as a member of the Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA). In the 1990s she was honored by the Sri Lankan Institute of Architects with a gold medal. While De Silva is mentioned because of her friendship with Le Corbusier (1), there are not many references to her work. She was the CIAM delegate for Sri Lanka and India for 10 years and participated in the CIAM conferences in Bridgwater and Aix-en-Provence. Her concept on Modern Regional Architecture from the early 1950s is not found in many architectural discourses. In 2003 Liane Lefaivre mentioned her as one of the first architects who followed or established the idea of critical regionalism.(2) De Silva’s work influenced Geoffrey Bawa and Ulrik Plesner, who worked for her in the 1950s in Kandy.
Minnette De Silva was educated in Britain and Sri Lanka. She started her architectural education in Bombay and finished her studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA School) in 1948. In London she was taught by Arthur Korn, who was the head of the AA. In 1944 she worked for Otto Koenigsberger in Bangalore “as his apprentice assistant to work on the Tata Steel City Plan in Bihar, East India.” (De Silva 1998:76)
In 1945 Marg magazine started, and Minnette de Silva went to England to study at the AA. That was the time when she was first invited to the CIAM conference in Bridgwater to present Marg magazine. She was the CIAM delegate for India and Ceylon for the next ten years until the end of CIAM.
After Sri Lanka gained its independence, she went back at her father’s request. “After returning to Ceylon the problems of being the first and the only woman architect there became apparent to me. I worked independently, not with a male partner or an established firm. I had to conquer the distrust of contractors, business firms, the government and architectural patrons, for until my appearance on the scene it had been a totally male dominated sector.” (De Silva 1998:114) Minnette de Silva was born into a prominent Sri Lankan Family. Her father was a member of the first National Congress of Sri Lanka. After his death, his political campaigns and the resulting shortage of money forced Minnette to live with her mother in Kandy and earn her own money as an architect. Her parents’ marriage was unconventional or even not acknowledged, because they came from different social milieus and classes. Her father was the first Sinhalese lawyer in Kandy; her mother Agnes Nell was a Burgher and suffragist. The right to vote was won in 1931. (de Mel 2001) Her sister Anil Marcia was a communist and later a founding member of Marg magazine together with Mulk Raj Anand. In the early 1930s Anil was attacked by the press for her anti-nationalist attitude and her resistance to the construction of caste and class. (3) Anil Marcia introduced Minette to the political avant-garde circles in Bombay.
From 1947 to 1951 Minette de Silva designed and built her first house, Karunaratne in Kandy, which marks a connection between regionalism and modernism: “In this house the architect, the craftsman and the artist have worked together.“(De Silva 1998:119)
In 1953 she published the article “A House in Kandy” in Marg magazine, in which she accurately explains the concept of the house. She doesn’t rely so much on an aesthetic connection, which can be found in the 1950s in terms of ideas of local and regional in modernist design. Her request was rather to use materials and methods from the surrounding areas. Her building sites were characterized by local craftsmen from the area.
She was also responsible for the planning of the Watapulawa Housing Estate. The housing project, established by the Housewife Association and Lorna Wright in 1958, enabled middle class government employees and their families to build 230 houses on an area of 40 hectares according to their own needs. Minette de Silva was the only official planner, but every family was also free to decide whether to use their own architect or to draw up a plan on their own. Minette de Silva based the plans on interviews with the future inhabitants (see questionnaire on the Watapulawa Housing Scheme). She developed three different construction plans for three houses on different budgets. Apart from the Senanyake Flats, a multi-story apartment building in Colombo, she exclusively built residential buildings. Later on, she developed tourist resorts. As a female architect she felt excluded from the field dominated by male colleagues. After Bawa’s success she gained little attention.
From 1975 to 1980 she taught the history of architecture at the University of Hong Kong. In Kandy she felt neglected and excluded from the male dominated circles of Colombo. Deals were made informally in the social circles of Colombo, while she lived off the beaten track in Kandy. (MH)

(1) A House in Kandy
(2) Critical Regionalism. Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World: Architecture and Identity in a Globalised World (Architecture in Focus) 2003
(3) Neloufer Mel. Pp.103: “Throughout her life we shall see Anil de Silva described, constructed and textualised in a particular way. The nationalist discourse on her hinges primarily on two facets: her caste and her sexuality. It foregrounds her “otherness” and her refusal/inability to conform to the tenets of respectability. It critiques her “rejection” of Sri Lankan values. In the construction of her sexuality, both right and left wing criticisms coincide. We shall also see that, in turn, much of Anil de Silva’s life and work was a response to these narratives, signifying that, despite her life’s journey from provincial city and small island to the cosmopolitan worlds of Bombay, Paris, and London, she carried with her a baggage of values with their own inflections of “respectability,” cultural orientation, and political commitment that crystallised in Sri Lanka in the early decades of the 20th century.”

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