‘New methods for the old’: how Minnette de Silva redefined modernity

Minnette de Silva, the first woman architect from Sri Lanka and the first Asian woman to be elected an associate of the RIBA, was almost forgotten by architectural history until recently. Unlike her Western counterparts, such as Jane Drew, after whom the British Women in Architecture award is named and with whom she was friends, de Silva was exoticised and erased for a long time.

De Silva put together an eclectic autobiography in the form of a book, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect (1998). A new architectural monograph on de Silva, Minnette de Silva: Intersections by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, brings fresh insight into this remarkable woman. Siddiqi, an assistant professor of architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University, focuses on African and South Asian historicity, archival studies, and feminist and colonial practices.

Borrowing from de Silva’s own writings, her letters and interviews, Siddiqi uncovers aspects of heritage politics and archival history that influence, obliterate, and mutate the experiences and work of women architects. De Silva’s references to the modernism of 1920s Europe (when she would have been a child), conjoined with Sri Lankan arts and crafts heritage to produce intensely and intentionally situated architectural works.

The modern and the ancient combined powerfully and ecologically in de Silva’s designs, such as the application of Sri Lankan water tank systems like those found in Anuradhapura and Sigiriya. At a time when the rest of the Indian subcontinent, newly freed from colonial rule but still fascinated by colonial expression, this was a brave and subversive move. As the author quotes, for de Silva, being “modern” meant making a small house seem “spacious and elegant”.

Siddiqi remarks on the deliberate placing of de Silva’s buildings within nature so that the exterior and interior expressed discrete ecological enclosures

De Silva also sought to bring Sri Lankan communities together (unlike British colonial rule, which had divided them) through participatory processes. For example, in the Watapuluwa social housing scheme, Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Malay, and Burgher families were brought together. Unlike other publications about de Silva, the book includes her larger projects, starting with Jinaraja College (1950) and the Watapuluwa housing (1958), demonstrating her ease in working at different scales.

The book focuses on two aspects: first, the embedment of the building within its context, rather than the creation of a tabula rasa; and second, “interior landscapes” that include a “variety of adjacencies of often disjunctive formal elements”. Siddiqi remarks on the deliberate placing of de Silva’s buildings within nature so that the exterior and interior expressed discrete ecological enclosures. The strong haptic elements of de Silva’s designs and the sequential movements created through spaces, levels, and links between the outside and inside form a distinctive part of the spatial experience.

The book has four chapters: Introduction, which explores de Silva’s life and works; Landscape/Ecology; Settlement and Society; and finally, Handicraft/Heritage. De Silva’s incorporation of decoration within usually blank modern buildings, using traditional arts of weaving, lacquer work, textiles, and terracotta relief, brought dynamism to the spaces that danced on the edge of past and present, or as de Silva wrote, “new methods for the old”.

I particularly liked how the book documents the present-day producers of handloom cloth and mats from the Dumbara Valley (Central Sri Lanka) and lacquered wood from Palle Hapuvida (also Central Sri Lanka) – not far from Kandy, where de Silva was born, grew up, and practised. This was such a different approach from the Western architects of her day, and it is good that this has been given space in the book. The monograph might have benefited from a map to show the sites of her projects for those unfamiliar with Sri Lanka, and a list of all her projects would have been helpful too.

The photographs of Minnette de Silva in the book – at ease, elegant, and composed in saris, on building sites and working with people – brought me, as an Indian, to the perception of how women in that part of the world are viewed. In South Asia, the internal and orientalist perception of women is often based on stereotypical conditioning, such as modesty, noted by the Indian post-colonial academic Priyamvada Gopal. 

In her own country, the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects awarded de Silva a Gold Medal 14 years after it recognised Geoffrey Bawa – whose work was greatly influenced by hers. Perhaps de Silva was too modest and fiercely proud – qualities that may have unwittingly contributed to her treatment by outsiders. When, in the 1970s, she was invited to Hong Kong as a lecturer on Asian architecture, one of her students recalled that she never spoke about her built work.

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Source: Courtesy of Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and MACK

Entrance at porte cochère and carport

Source: Courtesy of Helga de Silva Blow Perer and MACK

Study, view from dining room

Source: Courtesy of Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and MACK

De Silva’s incorporation of decoration within usually blank modern buildings, using traditional arts of weaving, lacquer work, textiles, and terracotta relief, brought dynamism to the spaces

Source: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

Street facade

Source: Courtesy of Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and MACK

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Many of her works have been demolished, although she is not alone in this, with many significant modernist buildings continuing to be lost across the world. Arguably, her greatest legacy is her book, her thoughts and theories inscribed within it. In this way, we can keep her work alive today, particularly in South Asia, where her architectural theories can benefit both people and land.

The term “subaltern” has been appended to women from non-Western backgrounds, most famously by the Indian feminist scholar Gayatri Spivak. By extension, South Asian women architects have become “subaltern” women architects. Given the tremendous contributions made by her, we can rightly place Minnette de Silva in the pantheon of women architects alongside her Western counterparts.

Why not extend our architectural vocabulary when architects are working all over the world, just as they did during de Silva’s life? There ought to be more to the decolonising movement than just examining vocabulary and language used in academia and practice.

Kenneth Frampton points to a wider “aspiration to some form of cultural, economic and political independence” in the acknowledgement of such non-Eurocentric and transatlantic forms of architecture in his book Modern Architecture: A Critical History (World of Art, 2020). Indeed, this wider aspiration would seem to be what Minnette de Silva also desired.

> Also read: MoMA’s exhibition illustrates the rich legacy of South Asian modernism

> Also read: Let’s celebrate the South Asian pioneers who blazed a trail for women in architecture