Sri Lankan architect and academic Minnette de Silva was a pioneer of climate-responsive, Modernist architecture in the country. The first Sri Lankan woman to be trained as an architect, she is known for adapting Western Modernist principles to incorporate local contexts, particularly the craft traditions of Sri Lanka, in an approach she called Modern Regional architecture.  

Education and career

De Silva was born in 1918 into an eminent, politically active family in Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); her mother Agnes Nell was a feminist activist and crafts advocate, who also designed their family home. Among the family’s close friends, and de Silva’s early influences, were the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy and the architect Oliver Weerasinghe. De Silva developed a strong interest in architecture early on but could not study architecture in Sri Lanka, having been unable to complete her schooling due to the family’s financial difficulties. She apprenticed  with the architects Homi Billimoria in Colombo and Mistri & Bhedwar in Mumbai, India, and then studied at the Government School of Architecture (now Sir JJ College of Architecture) in Mumbai, from where she was later expelled for her participation in the Quit India Movement. In 1944 she moved to Bangalore (now Bengaluru) to work under the architect and urban planner Otto Koenigsberger. 

In 1945, de Silva and her sister Anil, a journalist and art historian, were among the fifteen co-founders of the influential Marg magazine, led by Mulk Raj Anand, to which she also became a regular contributor. In 1946, De Silva began studying at the Architectural Association in London, and became the first Asian woman to join the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1948. She represented Marg at the sixth Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM, International Congress of Modern Architecture) in 1947 in England. During this period de Silva became acquainted with Le Corbusier, who became a close friend and significant professional inspiration. 

De Silva returned to Sri Lanka in 1948 and set up her own practice, the Studio of Modern Architecture, out of her family home in Kandy. She remained based in Sri Lanka in the 1950s, her most prolific decade, and travelled frequently in the 1960s. Of the forty or more projects de Silva designed in her career, only about twenty were constructed, a large majority of them individual residences. De Silva temporarily closed her Kandy office in 1973 out of concerns around the incumbent nationalist government, and moved to London. Here she wrote an overview of South Asian architecture in Bannister Fletcher’s History of Architecture, and as a result was offered a lecturer position at the University of Hong Kong, where she taught between 1975 and 1979. After returning to Sri Lanka in 1979, de Silva’s architectural practice declined, partly due to a dearth of skilled technicians; she undertook few commissions in the 1980s and 1990s but continued to write on Asian architectural history.

Philosophy and approach

De Silva was a proponent of what she called ‘Modern Regional Architecture’ — a philosophy informed by her Western architectural education and her deep appreciation for Sri Lankan traditions and crafts. While inspired by the functional subdivision, formal symmetry, and other design principles of Le Corbusier’s International Style, de Silva was committed to prioritising local history and contexts  and responding to the country’s climatic and social conditions in her work. Local materials and traditional crafts, such as weaving, lacquerwork and wood-carving were integrated into her projects both as part of construction and as decor; she also used patterned breeze blocks adapting ancient Kandyan reliefs. Her buildings were characterised by open plans, permeability between the interior and exterior, and generous natural light and air circulation, often achieved by means of mezzanine floors or inner courtyards creating vertical spaces, and transparent glass bricks used for partition walls. She pioneered the use of the central inner courtyard or meda midula in modern Sri Lankan architecture, adapting it from traditional Sinhala manor houses — it would also later be adopted by de Silva’s contemporary Geoffrey Bawa as a means to address shrinking plot sizes and the need for privacy. Her work is seen as a forerunner of Critical Regionalism, which emerged in the 1980s, and laid the foundation for the design philosophy that Geoffrey Bawa coined ‘Tropical Modernism’.

Residential projects

One of de Silva’s first projects, the Karunaratne House in Kandy (1951) features a complex interlocking arrangement of interior spaces suitable for both intimate family life and large gatherings. The house was furnished with hangings of locally crafted Dumbara mats, and featured  a mural by Sri Lankan Modernist painter George Keyt — which de Silva paid for personally when the clients refused to. The Pieris House I (1952) in Colombo is considered an archetypal Tropical Modernist home, featuring many of de Silva’s signature design principles — pilotis stilts raising the house off the ground, the use of local materials such as laterite stone, and a central courtyard. The various private housing projects de Silva undertook between the 1950s and 1960s exhibited her ability to work with various techniques and materials ranging from bare, unclad brick, stone, wood and rammed earth — as in the compact, low-cost Fernando House (1954) at Colombo — to modern roofing systems like the concrete shell of the Nadesan Villa (1961) in Kandy.  

In addition to standalone houses, de Silva designed the Senanayake Flats (1957) in Colombo, four blocks of three-storeyed apartments that constituted a novel approach to apartment design in Sri Lanka at the time, with their curving facades, large balconies, and courtyards creating permeability between indoor and outdoor spaces in a Modernist idiom. During this period de Silva also undertook design for the ambitious Watapuluwa Housing Scheme (1958) in Kandy, which aimed to create 250 houses for civil servants. De Silva took a participatory approach to the project, unprecedented at the time, determining prospective residents’ needs through questionnaires and individual consultations. Based on these she designed the masterplan, communal facilities, and a number of prototype houses and variations, catering to different economic segments and requirements, including topographic variations in the sites. Though many of the houses eventually deviated from her original designs, the project was an important model for multicultural cohabitation in Sri Lanka, with residents from diverse communities.

Institutional and commercial projects

De Silva designed three hotels in the late 1950s, two  featuring chalets on stilts with cadjan (coconut thatch) roofs. One of de Silva’s most ambitious projects was the Kandy Arts Centre, commissioned in 1982, which included a performance space, galleries and studios. Her initial design for the centre was altered many times during its construction due to changing requirements, such as the enlargement of the performance area, in some cases compromising its structural integrity and key design features such as the allowance of ample natural lighting into the theatre. Elements of her original vision that were retained include the courtyards, the torana or pillared gateway at the Centre’s entrance and the traditional tiled pitched roofs over the pavilions.

Publications, retrospectives and awards

Despite her pioneering contributions to Sri Lankan architecture, de Silva remained largely unrecognised during her lifetime — particularly in her home country — and a majority of her built projects were later demolished, extensively modified, or allowed to become derelict. In 1996, de Silva became the first woman to be awarded the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects’s Gold Medal. She published the first volume of her autobiography The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect (1998) a few weeks before her death.  In 2024, the exhibition 88 Acres: The Watapuluwa Housing Scheme by Minette de Silva, was held at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Colombo — the first exhibition in the country centred on an individual architectural project. 

De Silva passed away in Kandy in 1998 at the age of 80.