Minnette de Silva: An unfinished portrait

Source:sundayobserver.lk

De Silva being born in Kandy, Ceylon on February 1, 1918, hailed from a well-known multi-cultured and an influential family and was the youngest of three.

De Silva’s father had been a renowned key figure in the fight for independence in Ceylon while her mother had been an ardent campaigner for women’s’ right in the country.

De Silva was educated at St. Mary’s in Brighton, England and after she returned to Ceylon in 1929, she then moved to Bombay, India to be trained as an architect at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Arts, since she was restricted to be trained in Colombo.

De Silva received her first architectural project to build the Karunarathna house in Kandy, which became a noted turning point in de Silva’s career and life as it was the first ever building to be designed by a woman in Sri Lanka which later attracted much attention and controversy.

Career

Later in her career, her most challenging commission became the reclining and formidable 1958 public housing scheme in Kandy thus became the serendipity de Silva had been expecting and she seized it, consulting appreciably with future households themselves, whereas today, this type of inclusive methods of design and construction is widely celebrated.

Such projects had been additionally worked on a social level, cementing family members among Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims. As a forward step in constructing strong, combined communities, it became exemplary, no matter the problems that could rise; the country will lead towards independence. Minnette moreover continued her journey with designs and constructions of public buildings like her elegant Art Centre in Kandy, thus reinterpreted local building styles.

Minnette de Silva holds the distinctions of being the first Sri Lankan woman architect; first woman to establish her own practice known as the ‘Studio of Modern Architecture’; first Asian woman to be preferred as an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects; and the first woman to be awarded with a gold medal by the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects.

De Silva was widely known as a trail blazer in her own right in an era of male dominance. Yet for all, de Silva’s pioneering logical and much-acclaimed elegance, her popularity for being a ‘difficult woman’, by no means left her.

Many considered her as rigid and irritable, however at the time, being a woman in a male career in a developing country had been extraordinarily tough.

Minnette de Silva: a modernist at heart, she nevertheless ought to see its boundaries in an Asian context. Rather than break entirely with culture to introduce a new language in to her new designs and constructions, she had noticed a possibility to both revive a declining arts and crafts industry, while modernising conventional factors of Sri Lankan architecture.

Her designs have later became a sort of fusion, which she referred to as ‘Modern Religionism’.

De Silva’s houses were different in spirit from the usual neo-colonial, aristocratic buildings. Pierced screens and balustrades filtered the light; curly iron works and fine columns cast shadows on the white concrete walls while the staircases swept round in elegant curves.

Without tarnishing the Ceylonese culture, de Silva incorporated traditional Sri Lankan pots, fabrics and tiles which looked completely at home in their modernist interiors.

She had always believed in insisting on the importance of embracing the rich local traditions of arts and crafts of local artisans in to her buildings.

Later in her career as an architect, she taught herself Ceylonese art and crafts, which expanded on to trying her hand on pottery, painting and weaving in order to instruct craftsmen in the making and development of interiors.

Architect

Minnette de Silva being an architect whose life and work were so potent and pioneering, and regardless of her achievements as a woman architect, she was never given the recognition she deserved, even though her indomitable spirit continues to shine through her work inspiring countless others.

From counting Indira Gandhi as her childhood playmate, having Mahatma Gandhi as a family friend, Vivien Leigh and Peter Finch as home guests to discussing art with Pablo Picasso and having David Lean as a suitor, Minnette de Silva lived like an exotic Asian princess, but became an erudite conqueror of Modern Architecture.

Photo courtesy – Internet