Born in Kandy, Minnette de Silva was the first female Asian architect to be registered with RIBA

In 1953, De Silva wrote a prescient article for the Bombay-based arts and culture journal MARG describing the Karunaratne house as an experiment in ‘modern regional architecture in the tropics’. (MARG had been founded in 1946 by the writer Mulk Raj Anand with De Silva and her equally talented and single-minded sister, Anil) She expanded upon this theme later, writing, in a 1965 piece looking back at 15 years of her work, about the need for Sri Lankan architecture, ‘to absorb what we absolutely need from the modern West, and to learn to keep the best of our own traditional forms.’

[The private villa for the Karunaratnes'] clean, rectilinear forms sat within a lush garden; the house, with its expanse of window, terraces and deep, shaded verandas, aimed to bring building and landscape together: a commingling of outside and inside that De Silva intuitively understood to reflect the way people live in the tropical Sri Lankan climate. The midula – or courtyard room – was a form she returned to time and again in her buildings. She also stressed the importance of working with traditional craftsmen, enriching the stark formalism of her volumes with latticework, decorative cast tiles, lacquer-work and woven screens. ‘The craftsman,’ she wrote, ‘isolated from modern trends in life, has to be brought into the present, or else become a museum piece and extinct.’ She understood, too, modernism’s roots in global vernaculars – Corbusier’s white walls as inherited from archaic island architecture; moveable panels as re-imagined Japanese screens.