Minnette de Silva was an internationally recognized architect, considered the pioneer of the modern architectural style in Sri Lanka.De Silva was a fellow of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects. She was the first Sri Lankan woman to be trained as an Architect and the first South Asian woman to be elected an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)in 1948.
Background
Minnette was born on February 1, 1918 in Kandy to a prominent MP, George E. de Silva and Agnes de Silva, a universal suffrage activist. Minnette was educated at St. Mary's, in Brighton, England, and returned to Ceylon in 1929. She was not able to train as an architect in Colombo, so she had to persuade her father and her maternal uncle Andreas Nell to allow her to travel to Bombay to train at the J. J. School, Bombay.
Career
She returned to Sri Lanka in 1948 and her experiments in architecture began with the Karunaratne House, Kandy. This house still stands in the city as a testimony to the De Silva's novel approach to design.
In 1960 she left Sri Lanka for 5 years and called it her period of self-renewal. She spent this time travelling in Greece, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and revisited India. After her return to Sri Lanka she was engaged in the design of a series of large tourist hotels. In 1975, Minnette went Hong Kong to join the Department of Architecture as the first woman architect.
De Silva's work and life are discussed in Flora Samuel's book Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist.
Connections
Minnette was the fourth of five surviving children of George E. de Silva, a Sinhalese lawyer and founder member of the Ceylon National Congress, and his Burgher wife Agnes Nell. The family lived at St. George’s, a house at Katukelle on the outskirts of Kandy built by Minnette’s mother to a design based on her own parent’s house at Diyagama. Here they entertained a string of international figures including the Nehrus. But Agnes was not the only woman in the family to design a house – Esmé de Silva, the wife of Minnette’s elder brother Frederick, had studied at the Slade in London and had visited the Bauhaus. In the late 1930s she also designed her own house – the house which is now the hotel known as Helga’s Folly.