A talk by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi on her new book,
Minnette De Silva: Intersections
Time: 3:00pm-5:00pm
Location: Head Hi, 146 Flushing Ave, Fort Greene, Brooklyn
Co-sponsored by Mack Books, Head Hi, and the South Asia Institute
When Minnette De Silva founded the Studio of Modern Architecture in Kandy, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), 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 of private residences and public institutions, settlement planning, experiments in building and handicraft, research, curation, and writing. Her practice treated architecture as a lived experience and a contemporary expression of heterogeneous pasts.
Minnette De Silva: Intersections offers a richly illustrated critical introduction to De Silva’s practice, exploring a range of projects through the intersecting intellectual concerns that shaped her work. Archival materials, drawings, photographs, and extracts from De Silva’s memoir, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, describe her diverse work in a career situated in Sri Lanka and informed by substantial engagements with India, England, Greece, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Drawing on modernist architectural techniques and material heritage practices, De Silva forged a distinctive, critically engaged aesthetic program and set of values. This book by architectural historian Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, researched with Methmini Kariyakarawana and others, offers a primer to the thought and production of one of the twentieth century’s most significant architects and cultural figures.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Barnard College, and co-editor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence. She specializes in histories of architecture, modernity, and migration, centering African and South Asian questions of historicity and archives, heritage politics, and feminist and colonial practices. Her scholarship aims to foreground histories of marginalized people and figures and promote practices of collaboration and support, especially concerning the lives and narratives of communities that have been systematically excluded or silenced. Thinking through objects, buildings, and landscapes, her work examines intellectual histories and diverse forms of esthetic practice and cultural production. She is the author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press), on the spatial politics, ecologies, iconography, visual rhetoric, and long colonial traditions of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. Her book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva analyzes the politics of heritage environments through the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier, and draws on research for her book Minnette De Silva: Intersections (Mack Books). She practiced architecture for several years in Bengaluru and New York.
