“We are on the verge of scaling up,” says the architect Yasmeen Lari. “I need to achieve my target of one million in two years, starting this month.” One million homes, that is, to replace those lost in last year’s floods in her home country of Pakistan, one of the costliest natural disasters ever. This target sounds fantastical, but then Lari’s achievements to date are already exceptional and unexpected. The first woman to register as an architect in Pakistan, she made a successful career as a designer of office blocks and hotels, which she ended when she ceased to find it interesting. She then built another career documenting and preserving the country’s heritage, and then another helping the survivors of natural disasters to rebuild their homes.
Lari’s work has won her, at the age of 82, the 2023 royal gold medal for architecture, a 175-year-old award given annually by the British monarch on the advice of the Royal Institute of British Architects. It typically goes to designers of photogenic and high-profile cultural buildings – the last two winners were David Adjaye and Grafton Architects – rather than those who, as Lari describes herself, “work for the poor”. She professes surprise: “It’s not easy for them to pick someone who is not doing the usual thing.”
Her approach has been developed since the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, which killed more than 86,000 people, when she wanted to help out without at first having much idea how. “Barefoot social architecture”, as she calls it, aims to revive and adapt long-established techniques such as building with earth, lime and bamboo, as effective, extremely cheap and environmentally friendly ways of responding to the devastation of earthquakes and floods. It uses materials that are close to hand, and skills that can be readily taught, such that those affected can play a part in rebuilding their own homes.
She applies knowledge of traditional construction learned from her work with historic buildings, and devises ways of adapting old methods so that they are safer and stronger than in the past. Sometimes it’s a matter of engineering, sometimes of common sense, sometimes of creatively recombining constructional customs from different regions of Pakistan. Extreme circumstances engender intense practicality: one of Lari’s strategies is to enable people to buy roof structures for the equivalent of a few pounds sterling, under which they can build the walls themselves for free.
She doesn’t do all this alone, but through and with the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, which she and her late husband, Suhail Zaheer Lari, founded in 1980. Nor is it just a question of design: they also set up training programmes to help communities build for themselves. Lari does not see herself and her collaborators as architects, she says, so much “as co-designers and facilitators but also trainers”.
In these ways, tens of thousands of people hit by natural disasters have been empowered as well as assisted: they can rebuild and decorate their homes with their own hands. “Something I didn’t understand at the beginning,” she says, is that “just by using earth I unleashed a huge reservoir of creativity and design in women particularly.” Pakistani crafts in general have “patterns galore, whether it’s fabric, whether it’s stone”. The stuff of the new buildings allows this love and knowledge of ornament to be expressed on the walls of emergency housing.
Lari compares this kind of engagement with what she calls the “international colonial charity model” that “believes in treating people as victims, giving them handouts, telling them to use concrete and all kinds of materials that are going to be even more destructive to the planet”. This approach, she says, “has never worked”, and now that, due to climate breakdown, disasters are increasing in number and scale, “there is not a chance that it will work”. There is too much destruction and too little money. Donor fatigue has set in. The imaginably vast impact of last year’s Pakistan floods, for example, barely registered on the world’s consciousness. The only way, she believes, is to work in ways that require minimal external funding.
She says she’s had to “shed the ego” that drove her former career, as a designer of shiny corporate architecture. “What a terror I was when I designed these mammoth buildings,” she says. “If something was a little bit out of line, well it had to be demolished immediately. I was that bad, a control freak, as architects are supposed to be.” Now, if “things are not quite straight when I work in an earthquake area, as long as basic elements are in place, it’s OK”.
It’s not that Lari’s hand is completely invisible. Photographs of her Zero Carbon Cultural Centre, a bamboo structure with a curved thatched roof, close to the Unesco-listed Makli Necropolis, show the formal confidence of someone trained in the modernist tradition, for whom Le Corbusier was an early hero. So do her circular community buildings, raised on stilts to avoid floods. But her main inspiration is Hassan Fathy, an Egyptian architect who recognised the value, as long ago as the 1930s, of traditional ways of building with earth. Lari also cites John Turner, a British architect who in the 1960s and 70s championed the rights of people in the developing world to build and sustain their own homes and communities.
She calls Turner a “visionary”, who was “never given much credence”. Now, she believes, the time has come to put ideas like his into widespread practice, and for architecture to take a direction based less on formal perfection and more on the processes by which humane and zero-carbon buildings might actually be achieved. Although her work is focused on hard-hit areas of Pakistan, she believes its principles are applicable more or less universally. The effects of climate emergency are, after all, everywhere. And the materials Lari champions are also widespread in time and place: she points out that building in earth was once common including in parts of Britain, while the Roman architect Vitruvius wrote about lime before the birth of Christ. She acts local, in other words, but thinks global.
