Tilak Samarawickrema is an architect from Sri Lanka with a multi-faceted design background in Art, Textile design, animated cinema and Architecture.

His architecture is minimalist, and the work ranges from residential buildings, banks, factories, and corporate interiors. He has given the apparel sector of Sri Lanka a new image with a completely international aesthetic. His most recent factory, the Mihila Green Factory of the Hirdaramani Group, was the first factory worldwide to win the LEED Gold Award in the New Construction category (2009).
His work has been published in Domus, Abitare, Interni, DDN Design Diffusion News, Architectura OFX,Modo.

His line drawings, initially a doodling habit, later evolved into an interplay of line and space, incorporating the forms and curves of the Sinhala alphabet. Between 1969 and 1987 he exhibited his art in Milan, Rome, New York, Sao Paulo and Colombo. His recently published book, Ink of Lanka (2009), gives a retrospective overview of his work, synthesizing the line drawings, black and white photographs and reviews by art critics such as Pierre Restany and Bruno Munari. His art has involved a constant exploration of the limits of the line. In the 70’s whilst living in Rome and Milan, he gave these drawings a temporal dimension through the animated film, Andare` of Sri Lanka, which represented Italy in the Oberhausen Film Festival (1978). More recently, he translated the line drawings into life size wire sculptures, which employ light and shadow as an integral part of its aesthetic. In his studio in Colombo he is currently doing digital animations of the drawings.

In 1986-87 he worked as an ILO consultant to the National Design Center of Sri Lanka to revive and modernize indigenous crafts of the island. Since the late 1980s, he has designed cotton tapestries hand woven by traditional weavers of Talagune Uda Dumbara, the oldest weaving village in the island. The Deutsches Textilmuseum Krefeld (1995) and Norsk Form the architecture and design museum Oslo (1998) have held personal exhibitions of his work. The MOMA design store in New York marketed his tapestries for almost 8 years. His interest in textile has also taken him as a UNICEF consultant to Guatemala (1990) where he worked with Mayan Indian Weavers to design products to be marketed in world-wide UNICEF stores. More recently (June-July 2010) he traveled to Afghanistan as a consultant to IESC (International Executive Service Corps Washington) on an US-AID funded project to set up a Design Center for carpet weaving in Kabul.