Yasmeen Lari

The Barefoot Architect

Meet 80 year old Yasmeen Lari, Pakistan’s first female architect, turned humanitarian, who has created the world's largest zero-carbon shelter programme, building over 45,000 homes for the survivors of natural disasters using natural materials like mud, lime and bamboo.

As the daughter of a senior bureaucrat, Yasmeen was “born into a world of open doors.” She studied architecture in the United Kingdom, before returning home in 1963 to qualify as Pakistan’s first female architect. At the age of 23 she opened her practice, and designed some of the country's landmark commercial buildings. After an illustrious 35 year career as a 'starchitect', Yasmeen retired from practice in 2000.

Her retirement, however, didn’t last long.

In 2005, one of the most destructive earthquakes on record ravaged the region of Kashmir, killing more than 80,000 and leaving 3.5 million people homeless. Desperate to help, Yasmeen worked with volunteers to help people rebuild their homes with whatever materials were at hand. In the absence of sufficient aid money, she developed a blueprint for shelters that could be easily built using traditional mud construction.

For the past 17 years, subsequent earthquakes, floods and conflicts have kept Yasmeen on her toes, developing new techniques to create low cost, zero carbon and zero waste shelters. Her work has expanded beyond disaster reconstruction into the creation of the 'barefoot social architecture movement' which involves training villagers from impoverished communities to make building materials, like bamboo panels, glazed tiles, and mud bricks that they can then sell. 80% of the communities Yasmeen has worked with have been raised above the poverty line.

Yasmmen is passionate about using design as tool for empowerment. One innovation has been chullahstoves, smokeless earthen ovens that cost about $5 and makes cooking safer for women, while the raised-up platform of the stoves bestows them a new sense of dignity. Yasmeen sees her work as a collaboration: providing communities with an interactive blueprint to help them rebuild not only their homes and livelihoods, but their sense of ownership and pride.

“We often misunderstand what kind of help is needed. The aid mindset is to think of everyone as helpless victims, but if you give people something they can do themselves, it really helps recovery. If people have helped to make something it is much more valued than something that is simply given.”