Minnette de Silva

"When Minnette De Silva founded the Studio of Modern Architecture in Kandy, Sri Lanka, in 1947, she was one of the first women in the world to establish a professional architectural practice as sole principal. Today, she is known for her designs and constructions encompassing housing projects, public institutions, settlement planning, and experiments in fabrication and handicraft design. Her practice treats architecture as a lived experience and a contemporary expression of the heterogeneous pasts of its makers.This book by architectural historian Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi offers an incisive, richly illustrated introduction to De Silva’s practice. Exploring a variety of built projects, it focusses on intersections in De Silva’s practice designs relating to landscape, settlement, and handicraft. Photography, drawings, archival materials, and extracts from De Silva’s self-published autobiography describe the ways De Silva combined materials, themes, and narratives drawn from various contexts in Sri Lanka and India with techniques informed by international modernism to create a wholly distinctive, critically engaged aesthetic programme and set of values. Minnette de Silva: Intersections offers a practicaland illuminating primer to the thinking and making of one of the twentieth century’s foremost architects.Written and researched with Methmini Kariyakarawana"