Minnette de Silva has been an influential, if somewhat elusive, part of the larger histories of architecture in South Asia. While Geoffrey Bawa is celebrated as one of the pioneers of the Tropical Modernist style in Sri Lanka, de Silva’s story has, for far too long, been relegated to the margins. As the interest in uncovering and reclaiming the vital stories of the histories of women architects garners attention, especially in the context of post-colonial architecture discourse, it stands to subvert our understanding of an otherwise patriarchal genealogy, much like a recent exhibition at the MMCA on de Silva's legacy did; it is a legacy that pervades de Silva as a woman of many firsts: the first Sri Lankan woman to be trained as an architect, the first Asian woman to be elected an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and one of the first women in the world to establish a professional architectural practice as sole principal.

For her own part, de Silva was a self-styled ‘Asian woman architect’, also the title of her autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. Working prolifically in a recently independent Sri Lanka—with her studio responsible for approximately 50 projects as built works, including residential designs and institutional commissions—de Silva concerned herself with a morphology that “treated architecture as a lived experience and a contemporary expression of the heterogeneous pasts of its makers”. As a new book by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi details, the processes and productions of her architectural practice, beginning with her earliest projects, were deeply imbricated in questions over landscape and ecology, concerns of handicraft and heritage and an attentive understanding of settlement and society. A noteworthy example that combines all three (with a focus on designing an equitable settlement) is Watapuluwa Estate.

As Siddiqi notes, “[de Silva] focused on the reception, design, and construction of landscapes; the planning of settlements, as an outgrowth of the relation between societies and the constructed and natural environment; and the integration of handcrafted elements and handicraft labour processes in buildings and built environments." These concerns, discernible in the discourse of post-colonial architecture as well as critical regional design, find worthy exemplars in de Silva's work. While the introduction gives readers a snapshot of the life of a legendary woman, Siddiqi also enumerates how her work developed through the influences of family, work and education. Notably, de Silva’s work showcases a fine understanding of craftsmanship, integrating idioms of modernist architecture (pilotis, the use of concrete) and the use of organic materials and hand-fabricated elements such as weaving, lacquered wood and terracotta tile relief, making it quintessentially embedded in the region. Often, these crafted elements, experimental in nature, would reference motifs that called back to heritage sites in the country.

To aid a nuanced understanding of de Silva’s interaction with craft communities and traditions through architecture, STIR presents an exclusive excerpt from the book that showcases how this interest developed and how it was utilised practically.

Handicraft/Heritage

Much of my work has been based on finding a workable synthesis of traditional and modern architecture. Throughout my childhood, I had lived and moved among Kandyan craftsmen and artists.

I decided to live in Kandy, it being the centre of Ceylon and the heart of our national tradition. Once that decision was taken, I went back to the craftsmen I had known since my childhood days. Once more I got to know the dancers, the “Dumbara” mat weavers, in fact, all the artisans in the different crafts and decided to introduce their work into contemporary modern art to establish the principle of all artist-craftsman being involved with architecture.

Minnette De Silva attributed her interest in arts and crafts to a revival spearheaded in Sri Lanka by her parents’ generation. They aligned themselves with the concerns and writings of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, a geologist turned art historian who significantly impacted the study of traditional arts and crafts throughout South Asia. De Silva—a reader of William Morris, the nineteenth-century designer, socialist and proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement—worked against the alienation of the labourer from the craft product, a condition wrought by industrialisation worldwide, which impoverished crafts-based communities around Kandy. Drawing on Coomaraswamy’s foundational documentation of craft labour, she attempted to cohere craftsmanship and the fine arts. The architectural vocabulary of her designs drew on Surrealist techniques of dissonant, at times riotous visual juxtaposition: placing handcrafted elements among brutalist concrete plinths and pilotis and collocating native as well as exotic plantings.

De Silva engaged crafts production directly. Photographs in The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect by Magnum photographer Brian Brake show her visiting craftspeople in the villages near Kandy, sitting for a practical demonstration in Palle (Lower) Hapuvida with elder relatives of some of the craftspeople whose work appears in this chapter, specialists in lacquered wood crafts. She studied weaving in South Kensington, London, during a period after the Royal College of Art Faculty of Industrial Design established a School of Textile Design (whose Department of Weaving was headed by Bauhaus-trained Margaret Leischner). For her, handicrafts structured a local heritage to be imbricated with the architecture of the present day, yet not shorn of the forms of social and aesthetic difference they represented. Indeed, her work articulates those very intersections.

‘Minnette de Silva: Intersections’ by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is published by Mack Books in the UK and is available in leading bookstores.