Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Yasmeen Lari was the first woman architect in Pakistan. But when I use this remarkable fact as the opening gambit of our conversation, the 83-year-old is typically disarming. “Well, it’s not really that remarkable,” she says, speaking over video call from her home in Karachi. “There were probably only a dozen architects in Pakistan at the time in total. People didn’t know what architects did and the profession hadn’t been regulated. But being the first carries a certain responsibility — you feel you have to do the right thing.”For the last few decades, Lari has been doing just that. Although she is now globally recognised and multi-awarded (receiving the Riba Gold Medal last year), she uses her fame not to create ever more spectacular buildings but to work with deprived communities in places which have rarely, if ever, encountered an architect and in materials intended to cause only the minimum of environmental impacts. In the courtyard of the National Museum of Qatar, under the fierce sun and amid the reconstructed remains of the old royal palace, are scattered a few elegant installations of bamboo. In this setting, they look like wonderfully minimal art pieces. But these are examples of the kinds of homes Lari has been designing and enabling with her foundation for the victims of floods, earthquakes and mass migrations. Now they form part of Manzar: Art and Architecture from Pakistan, 1940s to Today, a major exhibition in which Lari plays a starring role.Her shelters stand up easily to the glassy architectural histrionics in the background. They are delicate, elegant and beautifulIt is a stark contrast with the work she was doing at the start of her career, returning to Pakistan after graduating from Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) 60 years ago. Her early houses were sculptural and robust (“I’ve since been called one of the first Brutalists,” she says, with a hint of an eye-roll) and from there she went on to design corporate buildings in a modernist manner, all concrete and glass (“I was very influenced, like we all were, by Le Corbusier,” she says).But then, she began to draw back. “I suddenly realised that I didn’t know about my own culture,” she says. “My father had been a British civil servant, very anglicised. We always looked to England and the West. And I began to look at traditional buildings and cities here [in Pakistan] and I saw that I needed to know myself, my own culture.”Together with her late husband Suhail Zaheer Lari, she established the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan in 1980, dedicated to recording and preserving a fast-disappearing architectural culture, from grand palaces to everyday vernacular, buildings that had evolved and adapted to climate and way of life. Lari was not alone in this desire to begin to engage with tradition. The exhibition traces a narrative from the modernism and optimism of the immediate post-partition period (Pakistan was created in 1947, an event precipitating mass displacement as well as a new nation), through a gradual reassessment of what was being lost.There are images here of huge interventions by the foreign designers who were invited to build the nation’s new institutions in the mid-century: Edward Durell Stone, Louis Kahn, Constantinos Doxiadis, Richard Neutra and the incredible university in Karachi by Michel Écochard. But there is also the backlash, the realisation that an urbanism built up over centuries embodied knowledge that was absent from the revolutionary, formal self-consciousness of Modernism. Lari was part of that renewed interest in the vernacular, the local and what might now be called the sustainable. For a few years at the turn of the millennium, Lari withdrew from design altogether, instead studying and documenting. She was spurred back into action by disaster. In 2005, a huge earthquake hit northern Pakistan, killing 80,000 and rendering more than 3.5 million people homeless. Uncertain how she could use her status and skills, Lari felt she had to try. “There was always too much desire for control after displacement,” she says. “The UN has an international colonial charity model and the system has not delivered. It’s a system that talks about people as ‘victims’, without their own agency. What we need instead is a humanistic humanitarianism, empathy, generosity, benevolence.”Lari began to design simple structures using easily available local materials (“barefoot architecture”, in her phrasing): bamboo, mud and lime, which had zero carbon footprint and in which the displaced became co-creators, engaged in the process rather than having housing imposed upon them. “We need to decolonise, decarbonise and democratise,” she says, employing an almost perfect contemporary architectural motto. Lari is enabling the displaced to create something very different from the grids of basic shelters wrapped in the UN’s blue tarps, familiar from the aftermaths of the world’s worst disasters. We can see their variety and surprising delicacy in the courtyard. Some of the circular shelters look almost ephemeral, yet these are robust structures with sophisticated, intricate workings and they allow their inhabitants to impose their own aesthetic on their new homes. “We developed a system of panels . . . with frames and cross-bracing that allow people to decorate so that it feels it belongs to them,” Lari tells me. “Some of the decoration is incredible, depictions of gardens and peacocks, creating a celestial world of their dreams.”A key part of what Lari is doing is to give the dispossessed the skills that will allow them to continue making the components for building and construction. Her Zero Carbon Cultural Centre in Makli, southern Pakistan, is an incredible-looking structure, like a bamboo aircraft hangar, its open walls decorated with what appear to be spiralling swirls. This truly exuberant space accommodates the teaching of the skills needed to perpetuate the buildings and establish trades, crafts and livelihoods, often for women who otherwise have few opportunities. There is also the “Chulah”, a stove fuelled by waste including cow dung and built on a platform that elevates the traditional domestic activity of cooking, making it performative, almost theatrical. Often they are painted in dazzling colours, striking in their blend of domesticity and openness. Back here, in Doha, amid the vast expanse and expense of the museum and with a background of the kind of glassy towers that Lari abhors, is this paradox; a woman architect working with her country’s poor and displaced, the results of which are presented as curios in the courtyard. Yet they absolutely hold their own; these practical products stand up easily to the architectural histrionics in the background. They are delicate, elegant and beautiful. Manzar is, almost unbelievably, the first serious exhibition of art and architecture from Pakistan anywhere in the world. With about 300,000 Pakistanis living in Qatar (about the same number as there are Qataris), the peninsula seems a fine place to make a start. Architecture is only a small part of this show. But Lari’s structures exert their presence, these zero-carbon shelters in the landscapes of oil. National Museum of Qatar to January 31 2025; nmoq.org.qaFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
