Yasmeen Lari

Lecture by Yasmeen Lari
Response by Assistant Professor Ateya Khorakiwala

Yasmeen Lari is the first woman to qualify as an architect in Pakistan in 1963, after training in the UK at the Oxford School of Architecture. Before officially retiring from practice in 2000, she designed many of Pakistan’s landmark modern commercial buildings for the corporate sector, as well as for low rise high-density housing for low-income groups. However, since becoming a national advisor to UNESCO consultant in 2003, she has helped with saving structures on the WHS of Lahore Fort and Makli. After the Kashmir earthquake in northern Pakistan in 2005, she became renowned for her work with communities living in disaster-prone areas of the country.

Drawn from the vernacular heritage of Pakistan, she has specially developed low carbon and low-cost structures that can withstand earthquakes and floods, in what she calls ‘barefoot architecture’ that treads lightly on the planet. She works directly with marginalized communities by supplying the technical knowledge and training for people to take charge of their lives and build structures that are resilient to and prepared for frequent extreme weather. So far, over 45,000 green shelters have been constructed through Lari’s outreach, making her work the world’s largest zero-carbon shelter program.

In 1980, she co-founded the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan with her husband and eminent historian, Sohail Zaheer Lari, to carry out this mission. The foundation offers training to largely non-literate individuals to make low-cost quality products that fulfill the unmet human needs of marginalized communities. One of these products is the Chulah, a design for a stove made from earth and lime that safeguards women’s dignity, health, and income. The stove won the World Habitat Award in 2018 and since 2014 has been installed in more than 60,000 locations, improving the health of an estimated 400,000 people.

Lari has received many awards as an architect, as a heritage conservationist and for her humanitarian architecture work - most notably the Star of Distinction in 2006 and Crescent of Distinction in 2014 from the President of Pakistan. In 2016, she received the highly acclaimed Fukuoka Prize from Japan for Asian Art and Culture. In 2016, Lari’s work was included in RIBA’s ‘Creation from Catastrophe’ exhibition, and her work is also part of RIBA’s permanent collection and was shown at the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015. She is the 2020 recipient of the Jane Drew Prize for the advancement of women in architecture.