Minnette De Silva was an architect from Sri Lanka, who started her business in 1948, building the Karaunaratne House in Kandy/Sri Lanka. The house combines modern construction methods and designs with local crafts and regional materials. Minnette de Silva was part of the Modern movement in Europe and Asia during the 1950s and afterward. While she is known in Sri Lankan architecture circles, the impact she had in India and Europe is less documented. Although her own work did not receive much recognition, her biography is filled with some of the most prominent figures of the modern architectural movement. Even though she never built in India, her impact on modern architecture discourse was great. While modern architecture is mostly associated with Chandigarh and Le Corbusier in India and later Balkrishna Doshi and Charles Correa, her work on networking and positioning modern South Asian architecture worldwide or at least in South Asia and Europe is often forgotten. As an editor of Marg magazine and a delegate for India and Ceylon at the CIAM conferences from 1946 to 1956, she tried to set up a Marg/CIAM group throughout the fifties in South Asia. Her approach to ‘modern regional architecture’ is found as a theoretical resource in Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis’s book ‘Critical Regionalism,’ published in 1980. In addition to this, the history on regionalism discourses within the field of architecture spread throughout the 20th century but only received widespread recognition with Kenneth Frampton’s “Toward a critical regionalism.”
Minnette de Silva occupies a very important discursive position. As a figure of her time, she brought together issues of modernism, post-colonialism, class, gender, and ethnicity. As a historical actor being studied by contemporary architects, she marks an important position in the history of architecture as a profession, not just because she was one of the first women from South East Asia trained as an architect, but also in terms of narratives. Her autobiography, published in 1998, is a collection of photographs, drawings, notes, and stories, which are presented in a somewhat nonlinear way. The book is reminiscent of a collage and, as such, her architecture. How she positioned herself is interesting as it changed with every setting. Her narratives rotate around terms of modern and traditional, regional and international, skilled and unskilled. Her awareness of the intersection between postcolonial, ethnicity, gender, and heteronormativity is described in the title of her book “Life & Work of an Asian Woman Architect.” Being exoticized in 1940s postwar London as an “exotic visitor from another planet”, (De Silva 1998: 82) “romanticized” by Le Corbusier as “the symbolic link with L’Inde the idealized symbol”, not taken seriously as an architect in Sri Lanka, and falling out of heteronormativity by living unmarried alone and concentrating on production rather than reproduction all bring together different layers of discrimination. In Sri Lanka she was also dominated by the international success of Geoffrey Bawa. Minnette de Silva’s marginalization within the modern movement has to be analyzed not only through place and space politics but also through chronopolitics. According to Elizabeth Freeman, “More specifically (...) bourgeois-liberal entities from nations to individuals are defined within a narrow chronopolitics of development at once racialized, gendered, and sexualized. Western ‘modernity,’ for instance, has represented its own forward movement against a slower premodernity figured as brown-skinned, feminine, and erotically perverse.“ (Freeman 2005: 57) Responding to chronopolitics, an interview project by the Guerilla Girls in 2006 staged Minnette de Silva as one of the interviewees: “Well my birth date is a little bit, I don't know actually but I, but I died in 1940, maybe more recently, anyway this last century.” (Guerilla Girls, 2006)
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Sources:
De Silva, Minnette (1998): The life & work of an Asian woman architect. Colombo: Smart Media Productions.
De Silva, Minnette (1975): "Architecture in Sri Lanka/Afghanistan/Nepal/Tibet/Burma/ Cambodia/Thailand/Indonesia." In: Sir Banister Fletcher's A history of architecture on the comparative method 18th ed. (revised by J.C. Palmes). London : Batsford.
De Silva, Minette (1963): "Notes on Indian industrialized housing estates." In : Ekistics, 16/96. 307-308.
De Silva, Minnette (1953): "A House at Kandy, Ceylon." In: Marg Magazine, Issue 6/3. 4-11. Flower, Sile/ Macfarlane, Jean/ Plant, Ruth (Eds.) (1986): JANE DREW. Architect. A tribute from colleagues and friends for her 75th birthday 24th March 1986. Bristol: Centre for the Advancement of Architecture.
Frampton, Kenneth/Mehrotra, Rahul (Eds.) (2000): World architecture 1900-2000 : a critical mosaic. Volume 8. Wien, New York: Springer.
Freeman, Elizabeth (2005): Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography. Social Text: The New Queer, special Issue 84/85. 57-68.Guerilla Girls:
Gunawardena, C A. (2005): Encyclopedia of Sri Lanka. New Delhi: New Dawn Press Group.
Lefaivre, Liane/Tzonis, Alexander (2003): Critical Regionalism. Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World. Munich/Berlin/London/New York: Prestel Verlag.
Pieris, Anoma (2004): “Beyond the Vernacular House.” In: Patrick Bingham-Hall: Houses for the 21st century. Sydney: Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.. 42-53.
Robson, David (2007): Beyond Bawa. London: Thames and Hudson.
Samuel, Flora (2004): Le Corbusier: architect and feminist. Chichester: Wiley.