This seminar examines historical contexts surrounding the work of Minnette de Silva, R.I.B.A. Associate (1918–1998), a feminist and environmental activist who worked in Sri Lanka, India, England, Greece, and Hong Kong in the second half of the twentieth century. One of the first women to establish an architectural practice as sole principal (in 1947 Ceylon), de Silva was also a founding editor of Bombay-based arts journal MARG, participant in CIAM, Sri Lanka Institute of Architects Gold Medalist, and Officer of Arts and Letters of France. Her career dynamically captured postcolonial problems of gender, race, and caste problems, and focused on recuperations of past landscapes and an ecological heritage during wartime.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, 2023). She is the co-editor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence and is developing the book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva on the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier.