A mirrored glass ziggurat stands on a corner in central Karachi, flanked by a pair of polished granite towers. Golden bubble elevators glide up and down behind the tinted windows, shuttling oil executives to their offices through the sparkling five-storey atrium. The Pakistan State Oil House is a power-dressed monument to the petroleum-fuelled excesses of the early 1990s, oozing ostentation from every gilded surface – so it comes as a surprise to learn that its architect is now building mud huts for the poor.



“I feel like I am atoning for some of what I did,” says Yasmeen Lari with an embarrassed chuckle. “I was a ‘starchitect’ for 36 years, but then my egotistical journey had to come to an end. It’s not only the right of the elite to have good design.”

The 79-year-old architect was awarded the prestigious Jane Drew prize in London in March, a gong that recognises women’s contribution to architecture, for her tireless humanitarian work over the last two decades. She joins an illustrious cast of previous winners, including Zaha Hadid, Denise Scott Brown and Liz Diller, but her career has been like no other, moving from glitzy corporate monuments to shelters built with the barest minimum of means.

A power-dressed monument to the early 90s ... the Pakistan State Oil House in Karachi. Photograph: Courtesy Heritage Foundation of Pakistan

Widely celebrated as Pakistan’s first female architect, Lari studied at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) before returning to her home country, where she began her practice with a series of daring brutalist homes in the 1960s and 70s. She made her name with a number of prestigious state commissions in the 1980s, including Karachi’s finance and trade centre, a vast hotel and a host of military barracks, as well as a low-income housing project that favoured low-rise high-density over the fashion for concrete-slab blocks. Then, in 2000, she retired, primarily to focus on writing books about Pakistan’s architectural history and put her energies into the Heritage Foundation, which she had founded with her husband in 1980.

“Corruption levels in the country had greatly increased and I was sick of always struggling to try and please the big corporate clients,” she says, “especially when they had no understanding of architecture. Writing seemed like a much more attractive option.”

But her quiet life wasn’t to last. In 2005, an earthquake of 7.6 magnitude on the Richter scale hit northern Pakistan, killing 80,000 people and leaving 400,000 families displaced. “I felt I had to go and help,” says Lari. “I had no idea what I could do as an architect. I’d never done any disaster work, or any projects in the mountains. I had no workforce, I’d given up my practice. But I found that, if you do something beyond your usual comfort zone, then help will always come.”

Everything I do is a collaboration, so I shouldn’t be known as the author of my work

While international aid agencies busied themselves erecting costly prefab housing with concrete and galvanised iron sheets, Lari worked with dispossessed families to rebuild their homes using mud, stone, lime and wood from the surrounding debris. Working with volunteers, she trained local people how to use whatever materials were to hand to rebuild in a better, safer way.

“I think we often misunderstand what kind of help is needed,” she says. “As an outsider, you do things that you think are appropriate, but the reality here is different. The aid mindset is to think of everyone as helpless victims who need things done for them, but we have to help people to do things for themselves. There’s so much that can be done with what’s already there, using 10 times less money.”

She says that the process of co-creation can also be a crucial part of healing. “Disasters can be truly devastating and people easily fall into deep depression. But if you give them something to do, it really helps with recovery. Something people have helped to make is much more valued than something simply given.”

‘I think female architects in the UK have a much tougher time’ ... Yasmeen Lari. Photograph: Courtesy Heritage Foundation of Pakistan

Since 2005, a sequence of further earthquakes, floods and conflicts have kept Lari and her team at the Heritage Foundation on their toes, developing agile techniques with bamboo, mud and lime, always following the principles of low cost, zero carbon and zero waste. Severe flooding in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh provinces in 2010 saw them develop a design for modular community centres raised on stilts, which safely survived more floods a couple of years later.

When earthquakes hit Balochistan province in 2013 and Shangla in 2015, Lari designed shelters using a cross-braced bamboo framework, learned from the vernacular dhijji technique. Testing the prototype on a shaking table at NED University in Karachi, they found the structure was capable of withstanding an earthquake more than six times the strength of the 1995 Kobe disaster. If the homes ever did begin to crumble, they could be easily rebuilt using the same organic materials – unlike their concrete and steel counterparts.

“There’s so much money in disaster relief,” says Lari, “but we need to put much more effort into disaster preparedness.” She is critical of the “universal solutions” offered by aid agencies and the siloed ways in which they work, as well as the urbanised mindset imposed on rural communities, insisting instead that responses should follow “forms based on age-old wisdom”.

Beyond disaster reconstruction, her foundation has developed a programme of what she calls “barefoot social architecture” for impoverished communities in Sindh province, running training programmes to get rural villagers to make building components and products that they can sell on to each other. Each village specialises in making a different item, from bamboo panels to glazed tiles, mud bricks and ceramic goods, as well as fuel briquettes and soap, minting a new class of “barefoot entrepreneurs” in the process. She says that 80% of the communities they’ve worked with have since been raised above the poverty line.

Training up the next generation of craftswomen ... Yasmeen Lari’s Zero Carbon Cultural Centre, Makli, Pakistan. Photograph: Courtesy Heritage Foundation of Pakistan

One innovation with a particularly big impact has been a programme of building chulah stoves, smokeless earthen ovens that cost about £5 to make. Traditionally, cooking is done on open-flame fires on the floor, which can cause serious respiratory infections and eye problems, while food is easily contaminated, leading to diarrhoea. Lari’s design features enclosed stoves on a raised podium, built and decorated by local women, which makes cooking cleaner, safer and bestows a new status on the cooks. The women are now raised up on a throne-like platform, rather than squatting on the floor, which has had an impact on men’s attitudes towards them.

“I really wasn’t expecting this,” says Lari, “but it has transformed the women’s self-esteem. They’re so proud of their stoves, which they decorate beautifully and keep absolutely spotless.” Following the barefoot entrepreneur model, a cohort of women were trained to build the chulahs, in turn training other women for about £2, creating a chain of artisans who can monetise their new skills. Since 2014, more than 60,000 stoves have been built, improving the health of more than 400,000 people – and the local female entrepreneurs earn 25 times their original income.

On a four-acre campus in Makli, on the edge of a Unesco-listed necropolis, the Heritage Foundation now has a dedicated space to train up the next generation of craftswomen, many coming from the nearby mendicant communities, who had always relied on begging for alms. Taking the form of a great thatched-roof hangar, walled with decorative bamboo screens, the Zero Carbon Cultural Centre provides a colourful social space where women and young people can come and go, as well as joining in the workshops, learning to make everything from terracotta bowls to composting eco-toilets.

A decorated chulah stove. Photograph: Courtesy Heritage Foundation of Pakistan

So what does this latest international prize mean for Lari, Pakistan’s first female architect, whose work has encompassed fashionable brutalist villas, mirrored office towers, heritage restoration projects and now essential humanitarian relief for the poorest of the poor?

“I feel like such an imposter,” she says. “Everything I do is a collaboration, so I shouldn’t be known as the author of my work.” As for the gender question, she is frank. “It’s a fallacy to think that women like me have really battled. Pakistan is still a very male-dominated society, but if you are a woman working in public life then you are already part of the elite, with a powerful support system behind you. I think female architects in the UK have had a much tougher time.”

She says she often struggles to reconcile her privileged background with the nature of her work, as the daughter of a senior civil service bureaucrat, born into a world of open doors. “I can’t say I’m a rebel,” she insists. “Sometimes I feel I should be living like the women in the villages that I work with – but I enjoy my comforts too much.”