Minnette de Silva

Minnette de Silva (2nd from left) at the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Breslau in 1948, Pablo Picasso on her left, Jo Davidson on her right, Mulk Raj Anand on the far right

Minnette de Silva (born February 1, 1918 in Kandy , then British Ceylon ; † November 24, 1998 , Sri Lanka ) was an architect and pioneer of tropical modernism in Sri Lanka. She was the first Sri Lankan woman to be trained as an architect and the first Asian woman to be elected as an associate member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1948 .

In the years after the Second World War, she was one of the few architects who ran her own architectural office.

biography

Adolescence

Minnette de Silva was born on February 1, 1918, at the time of British colonial rule in Kandy to a family of the local upper class who were politically committed to the independence of their country. Her older sister Marcia (better known as Anil) became an art historian and journalist; one of her brothers, Frederick, was Ceylon’s ambassador to France (1968–1971). Her father George E. de Silva was a lawyer, Sinhalese and Buddhist, while her mother Agnes de Silva (née Nell) belonged to the small Burgher minority and was a Christian denomination.

George de Silva was a member of the legislative assembly of Ceylon and was temporarily Minister of Health of British Ceylon from 1942 to 1947. The mother was an early advocate of women's suffrage (which Ceylon actually introduced in 1931 - long before many European countries). Through her mother, Minnette developed a strong interest in Sri Lankan handicrafts, which was to be reflected in her later work as an architect.

Minnette and her sister Anil accompanied their parents to Europe in 1928 to attend a conference in England on universal suffrage and women's suffrage. During this trip to Europe it was decided that Minnette would stay in England to study at St. Mary's School in Brighton. But in 1930 Minnette was withdrawn from school due to the financial crisis and returned to Ceylon.

The struggle for independence gained momentum, and Minnette's parents were actively involved. The political activities of the de Silvas made it possible for Minnette to meet many Indian nationalists of the time. For example, Jawaharlal Nehru (who became the first Prime Minister of independent India in 1947) visited them in 1931.

At the same time, Silva's family was also connected to Ceylon’s artistic avant-garde. Minnette made friends with the painter George Keyt, whom she met through her mother's cousin, the photographer Lionel Wendt . Minnette's appetite for art was tireless. In her autobiography, she describes her antics as a teenager with her sister Anil in the world of theater and art.

Upbringing in India

According to her later autobiographical reports, she had been interested in architecture since childhood. After briefly working for an architect in Colombo, she asked her parents to enable her to attend a private architecture school in Bombay . Her father refused her request, but her mother and uncle supported her morally and financially. Minnette de Silva went to Bombay to study in 1938.

After an apprenticeship in an architecture office and courses at a private architecture academy under the direction of GB Mhatre, Minnette de Silva was accepted at the state school for architecture. However, she was expelled for participating in a student strike after Gandhi's arrest during the Quit India Movement .

In 1942 Minnette de Silva returned to Ceylon after the Battle of Singapore due to the war in the Indian Ocean . Soon after her return to India she was working with Otto Königsberger , an important figure in the modern history of Indian architecture. The German refugee Königsberger was appointed architect for the state of Mysore (now Karnataka ). She worked with Königsberger on the Jamshedpur (TataNagar) project, a city planned for the Tata steel mill.

In 1945 Minnette de Silva and her sister Anil helped found the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARG), a group of architects, artists and critics from Bombay who are dedicated to the ideas of modernism. The first issue of the group magazine Mārg - that is, Weg in Hindi or Urdu - appeared in 1946.

Studies in London

During the spring break of 1945, Minnette de Silva returned to her country. There she met Lord Soulbury in Ceylon, who recommended her to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). This enabled her to begin studying at the Architectural Association (AA School of Architecture) in London in autumn 1945 . With its Asian beauty and the use of colorful saris, it creates a remarkable impression. In the English capital, Minnette de Silva received a modernist architectural education that she would complete in the course of her career.

In the winter of 1946 Minnette de Silva went on a trip to the European continent, where she met Le Corbusier , with whom she wanted to establish a lasting relationship. Le Corbusier gave her the nickname "little island bird". In her autobiography, she writes that it was the famous French-Swiss architect's first encounter with India, a few years before his work on the new city of Chandigarh (Punjab).

Participation in CIAM

While still studying at the AA, Minnette de Silva took part in the first post-war assembly of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM). The meeting took place in Bridgwater, England, in 1947. Minnette de Silva was the self-appointed representative of Ceylon and India. She presented the work of MARG and the first issues of the now famous Indian art magazine of the same name. She stayed with CIAM until 1956, always as a delegate from Ceylon and India. There she was the liaison between MARG and CIAM.

Minnette de Silva graduated from AA in 1948 and was the first Asian woman to become an associate member of RIBA. Her father then asked her to return to the newly founded Ceylon. Before returning, she attended and spoke at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw in August 1948 , where she was accompanied by her father and the Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand , editor-in-chief of Mārg.

Architecture office in Kandy

In 1949 Minnette de Silva moved to St. George's, her parents' house in Kandy, where she founded her architectural practice. She chose to work independently and not as an employee. She described her difficult situation:

After returning to Ceylon, the problem of being the first and only female architect became clear to me. I worked independently, not with a male partner or an established company. I had to overcome distrust of contractors, corporations, the government and the patrons of architecture, because until my appearance on the scene it had been a completely male-dominated sector.

De Silva is inspired by the work of her friend Le Corbusier, but much more in line with local building models. She recognizes the limits of copying Europe or pretending that nothing has changed:

Our community and social needs should find regional expression in city maps, housing plans and public buildings. What happens so often is that we pretty much copy the closed western building types that are unsuitable for our region, or adapt traditional architecture in an equally unsuitable way.

She demonstrated her principles in a number of housing projects. Her first work was the Katunaratne House in Kandy (1947–1951). She wrote a review of it in Mārg magazine in 1953 . For this project she used a modern architectural style: concrete columns, trusses and glass blocks. She also used more traditional materials like brick and wood, taking into account local handicrafts - lacquer, weaving, terracotta tiles - as well as works by Sri Lankan artists. She called this architecture "supraregional" because she added movable panels from traditional Japanese architecture to create the internal partitions. She sought a close relationship between the inside and the outside and let the rich nature of the surroundings invade the house. She wrote:

In our tradition there has always been a strong and symbiotic relationship between architecture and the environment. No building can be designed or completed without this awareness of landscape and architecture.

In addition, from the beginning of her career, de Silva emphasized the importance of incorporating the rich local tradition of handicrafts into her buildings. She was committed to hiring local potters, tilers and artists. She learned to weave herself to train artisans to make woven panels for dividing rooms and covering ceilings.

After the death of her father in 1950, Minnette de Silva made a brief visit to Europe in December, where she found a more understanding environment for her work. She spent time with Le Corbusier and met many Indian modern artists in Paris. At that time, her sister Anil was living in the 15th arrondissement. Minnette de Silva also took part in the Milan Triennale in 1951.

Back in Ceylon, she started building houses again. Her most notable projects include Pieris House (1952), Asoka Amarasinghe House (1954) and the Coomaraswamy semi-detached houses (1970) in Colombo.

Minnette de Silva employed locally trained technicians, and her team rarely exceeded six people. In 1956 she was joined by a young English architect, Michael Blee, who was replaced the following year by the young Danish architect Ulrik Plesner. Plesner worked with her throughout 1958 until he accepted an invitation to work with Geoffrey Bawa in Colombo, bored with provincial life and the fact that Minnette de Silva did not pay him a regular salary.

Minnette de Silva was also interested in social housing, for which she wrote an article entitled "Cost Effective Housing Studies" (1954–1955). In the Senanayake (1954–1957) apartment building in Colombo, she used Corbusier apartments, piles and a flat roof. However, to optimize air circulation, multiple levels, midula (courtyard) and stairwells were used in the center of the plan.

Minnette de Silva was at the height of her career in the 50s. After her mother died in 1962, she had some health problems. She continued to travel in the 1960s, spent long periods abroad and left her architectural practice in decline. Ironically, her career began to hesitate right at the very beginning of the architect Geoffrey Bawa's career .

Teacher in Hong Kong

In 1973 Minnette de Silva closed her office and moved to London. She wrote the South Asian part of a new edition of Banister Fletcher's groundbreaking book "A History of Architecture". This opened the doors to the University of Hong Kong, where she was a lecturer in the history of architecture from 1975 to 1979.

Kandy Art Center

When Minnette de Silva returned to Kandy in 1979, she tried to revive her architecture office, which had died at the time. In 1982 she was commissioned to design an arts center for the Kandy Arts Association at a location overlooking Kandy Lake near the Temple of the Tooth . Minnette de Silva wanted the art center to be a living illustration of contemporary Kandyan architecture. This complex, open and well integrated into the site, includes an auditorium, a restaurant, a foyer with galleries and workshops. Tile roofs on stilts are often found in general construction.

Last years

Since the 1990s, Minnette de Silva has been working on her memoir, Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect (1998). The book is an autobiographical album as well as a summary of their professional career, an architectural monograph and an amateur history of Sri Lanka.

After a fall and subsequent complications, Minnette de Silva died on November 24, 1998, alone and forgotten in Kandy Hospital, a few weeks before the publication of the first volume of her autobiography.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ CA Gunawardena, (A. Charles): Encyclopedia of Sri Lanka . 2nd rev. ed. New Dawn Press, New Delhi 2005, ISBN 1-932705-48-1 .
2. ^ Helen Rappaport: Encyclopedia of women social reformers . ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, Calif. 2001, ISBN 1-57607-101-4 .
3. ^ ^{A b} Ellen Dissanayake: Minnette de Silva: Pioneer of Modern Architecture in Sri Lanka . In: Orientations . tape 13 , no. August 8 , 1982 ( suravi.fr ).
4. ^ ^{A b c} Minnette De Silva: The life & work of an Asian woman architect . 1st ed. Smart Media Productions, Colombo 1998, ISBN 955-95120-0-5 .
5. ^ ^{A b c d} David Robson: Andrew Boyd and Minnette de Silva: Two Pioneers of Modernism in Ceylon. In: Matter. March 4, 2015, accessed June 25, 2019 . 
6. ↑ DJ Huppatz: Modern Asian design . Bloomsbury, London 2018, ISBN 978-1-4742-9678-6 (English).
7. ↑ mārga मार्ग مارگ. John T. Platts: A dictionary of Urdu, classical Hindi, and English . WH Allen & Co., London 1884 (English, Urdu, Hindu, Persian-Arabic)
8. ^ Le Corbusier: Le Corbusier and the continual revolution in architecture . Monacelli Press, New York, NY 2000, ISBN 1-58093-077-8 .
9. ^ Eric Paul Mumford: The CIAM discourse on urbanism, 1928-1960 . MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2002, ISBN 0-262-63263-2 .
10. ↑ ^{a b} Minnette de Silva: A House at Kandy, Ceylon . In: Marg . tape 6 , no. 3 . Bombay June 1953, p. 4–11 (English, beginning of article online ).
11. ↑ Tzonis, Alexander; Stagno, Bruno; Lefaivre, Liane: Tropical architecture: critical regionalism in the age of globalization . Wiley-Academic, Chichester 2001, ISBN 0-471-49608-1 (English).
12. ↑ Sarah Howell: Palace Revolution . In: The Guardian . May 1, 2000 ( theguardian.com ).
13. ↑ Plesner, Ulrik .: In situ: an architectural memoir from Sri Lanka: how Ulrik Plesner and Geoffrey Bawa with a spirited group of architects, artists and craftsmen created a new architecture for Sri Lanka based on a fruitful fusion between western, colonial and local building traditions . [Copenhagen], ISBN 978-87-91984-21-1 .
14. ^ Liane Lefaivre; Tzonis, Alexander: Architecture of regionalism in the age of globalization: peaks and valleys in the flat world . Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon 2012, ISBN 978-0-415-57578-2 (English).
15. ^ Minnette de Silva: Kandyan Art Association Centenary Center. In: Archnet. March 1987, pp. 32-36 , accessed April 26, 2020 (English). 
16. ↑ Emily Nonko: "Asian Woman Architect": Minnette de Silva's Vision of Tropical Modernism. In: Pelican Bomb. November 29, 2017, accessed June 25, 2019 .