Prof. Chitra Weddikkara
Prof. Chitra Weddikkara met her husband-to-be and discovered her future profession roughly around the same time. It was 1968 and she was a young student of the biosciences. Her parents, who couldn’t bear the thought of sending her to far away Peradeniya were more willing to consent to a course in architecture at Moratuwa. Taken to seek guidance from the architect who had worked closely with her family, she was told he had a nephew named Susil who would also be pursuing the same course. By the time she graduated with her BSc in Built Environment – the only girl in her class to do so - she had acquired a fiancée and already knew the next step. It was Australia and the higher studies she’d need to qualify as a chartered architect where, once again, women would be in short supply in the examination hall.
The first woman to be elected the President of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects (SLIA) in 56 years of its existence, Prof. Chitra doesn’t seem to have so much as broken through the glass ceiling as failed to have noticed its very existence. The former Head of the Department of Building Economics at the University of Moratuwa and currently a senior lecturer at the same, she is also thePresident of the Commonwealth Association of Surveyors and Land Economy as well as the immediate past-President of the Institute of Quantity Surveyors. She is the Chairperson of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors SriLanka (RICS), Secretary/ Overseas Representative of the International Chapter of the Australian Institute Quantity Surveyors and a Director at the Chamber of Construction Industry Sri-Lanka (CCI). In a career that spans over 30 years, which includes her work as a principal partner in a private practice, these are only some of her honours.
When she walks onto a building site, Prof. Chitra is as likely to be the chief architect as she is to be a consultant. The latter is thanks to her having chosen to become a qualified quantity surveyor during the 1970s (and was reportedly the first woman in Perth, Australia, to become so) at the urging of her mother-in-law. A math whizz, the latter served Prof. Chitra’s father-in-law as his unofficial quantity surveyor on most of his architectural projects. Prof. Chitra says her interest may have begun as a way to please someone so important to her husband, but it was soon where her own interest lay as well.
Though they had initially intended to return home to Sri Lanka, the couple chose to linger abroad when a Labour government extended an invitation to young professionals such as themselves to stay on. The two took on many projects but Prof. Chitra remembers the round houses she designed in the aboriginal style with particular fondness. The 11 years they lived there were punctuated by regular trips home and by momentous happenings in the family – the passing of Prof. Chitra’s mother but also the birth of her daughter.
In the years they lived and practised architecture in Australia, Prof. Chitra learned how to negotiate an overwhelmingly male dominated environment. Though diminutive, she says now that the trick lay in carrying herself with absolute assurance. “I would go straight to the supervisor,” she says, adding that she was always dressed with just the right degree of formality. A largely sheltered upbringing meant she had to accustom herself to the rough ways in which the Australian contract teams did business. Still, despite the scarcity of women on the worksite she seldom felt disrespected. In fact, she used her gender to her advantage, deploying charm and straight talk by turns to get a project moving along. “Things actually were easier in Sri Lanka,” she says, explaining that local crews proved more respectful, though they came with their own set of problems.
The work she continues to do with her husband and the support she receives from him and her two children have made a successful career possible, she