Towards Barefoot Social Architecture: A Conversation with Yasmeen Lari, Part 1
This is the first in a series of two posts. You can read the second post here. The Urdu version can be found here.
Architects are said to mature late in life, yet Yasmeen Lari has known success since the very start of her career in 1964 and has had her finger on the pulse of the profession for over sixty years. Since 2005, her passions have returned to where she began—in housing for the poor and finding architectural solutions towards what she calls social good. In 2020, she received the Jane Drew Award, which celebrates female architects.
Forty-five years ago, Lari won a governmental commission for low-cost social housing on the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan. Completed in 1975, Anguri Bagh became an important example of building for the poor, using primarily local materials and local labor. She drew inspiration from the multi-story, multi-family residences of Lahore’s Old City. The Mughal-era buildings there are arranged within a dense urban context, and the challenge for Lari was to recreate the efficiency of the arrangement to suit a new public. The result was 787 offset apartments, stacked and adjacent, utilizing locally produced burnt brick reinforced with steel. They comprised modest one to two-bedroom spaces that bring in light and ventilation, while also providing spaces for husbandry. Like Hassan Fathy’s New Gourna Village from the 1940s, Anguri Bagh did not fulfill its potential as a progressive vision. Owing to governmental missteps and the popularity of the building complex, the leases were given to middle-income people. Nonetheless, the complex remains one of the most aspirational public housing projects in Pakistan.
As the first woman President of the Architects Institute of Pakistan, appointed in 1980, Lari was charged by the Government of Pakistan to formulate a new Housing Policy for the young nation. Although her interests focused on housing, from private residences to army barracks, her practice also included large commercial projects. In Karachi, where her practice was, she designed some of the most iconic buildings, from the Taj Mahal Hotel (1981) to the Finance and Trade Center (designed in 1982, completed in 1989). In many ways, the history of Lari’s architectural practice reflects larger trends in architectural history in the second half of the twentieth century, from social architecture in the 1970s to neoliberal postmodernism of the following decades, to low-income and low-carbon building today (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Flat Roof Structure, Sindh (2011). Photograph courtesy of Heritage Foundation.
Lari’s practice has also been multifaceted in its attention to historical documentation and preservation. In 1980 she co-founded, with her late husband Suhail Zaheer Lari, the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, an initiative whose mission is to document and conserve the diverse historical architecture of the country. Taking a research-based approach, the foundation has published monographs on colonial architecture in Karachi, indigenous building practices in Thatta, as well as Samma and Tarkhan monuments in Makli (14th to 18th centuries). The work of the foundation has now evolved to include disaster relief and rebuilding at-risk communities, as well as advocating for environmental justice. As Lari has said in recent interviews, the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan’s north was a turning point. Forced to help provide the most basic yet essential habitation for over 400,000 displaced people, Lari joined local and international aid agencies to search for long and short-term solutions. And with that, began a new chapter in her remarkable career—at once a new beginning and a coming home.
I have known Yasmeen Lari for several decades, personally and through her buildings and publications. Mrs Lari, as she is popularly known in Pakistan, embodies the ideals of a visionary architect and a professional woman, with great ambition and an abundance of generosity. She has also inspired me in my academic career, setting an example of scholarship that is not just looking to the past but to the future; of an ethical practice, as it were. We spoke over the past couple of months about her current work, which she labels Barefoot Social Architecture (BASA), and its roots in earlier projects that she has undertaken. What follows is the first part of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Kishwar Rizvi (KR): Thank you for agreeing to this conversation. How have Covid-era restrictions affected your work in the villages?
Yasmeen Lari (YL): My interview on BBC Urdu got a lot of attention and many people called for me to help them. But since I’m not a contractor or a developer, I was thinking how to make this knowledge available for everyone at a time when our movement was restricted. It seemed that the best way would be to put tutorials on YouTube in Urdu, making them very accessible, especially to the poorest of the poor. We are recording video tutorials on our Zero Carbon Channel for making the bamboo and earth structures that I have designed for post-disaster and low-income communities. Basically, we’re telling people that they don’t have to wait for outside assistance, they can do it themselves (Figure 2). The villagers don’t have ownership of the land, which means they have few possibilities to ever live with dignity. This is wrong, but we are forced to work within the system.
Figure 2. Women plastering their home, Sindh (2011). Photograph courtesy of Heritage Foundation.
We’re also thinking of setting up a helpline, so that people can call and find what to do. I want to reach out to women, particularly, as there are a lot of women architects in Pakistan, some of whom are not allowed to go out and work. If I can reach out to them and somehow connect them to women in rural communities, it would have a real impact. In the rural areas, it is the women who spearhead change, and we could thus create a network for them.
KR: I’d like to return to the issue of equity and dignity and how architecture can be a force of social good. I believe what you’re undertaking now has roots in your earlier work, so perhaps we can backtrack for our readers, with some of your earlier work. Can we see links between Anguri Bagh and Barefoot Social Architecture (BASA), do you see the seeds of the earlier project in your current efforts towards efficient and sustainable architecture?
“Forced to help provide the most basic yet essential habitation for over 400,000 displaced people, Lari joined local and international aid agencies to search for long and short-term solutions.”
YL: As I look back now, I think I was just very lucky because when I had gone to England for my architecture studies [Oxford Brookes University of Architecture, 1963], I had hardly any idea about sustainability or heritage. In Pakistan, my husband and I visited old towns that we had never been to before, and suddenly a whole new world opened up.
With Anguri Bagh I was trying to replicate the spirit of the walled city of Lahore where you have multi-level living and where women occupy specific spaces, such as the rooftops (Figure 3). The new developments going up in the 1960s had lots of roads in the middle, and two-story houses that were totally deserted. They didn’t work for the people. When I went to historic cities in Punjab, I found them so full of life. Everybody was interacting, everyone knew each other, there was so much camaraderie. And I thought, my god, what are we doing with these new developments, separating people from each other. I really loved the old buildings, they were perfect for women—you can be in one room and talking to someone else in another room, on one rooftop and waving at someone on the other.
Figure 3. Elevation drawing of Anguri Bagh, Lahore (1965). Photograph courtesy of Lari and Associates.
I was asked to do public housing by Mubashar Hasan, the Finance Minister in the Bhutto government, in 1973. Anguri Bagh was designed as a complex aggregate of narrow streets and low-rise structures, connected by walkways, so that you can go from one level to the other (Figure 4). There were many questions asked in the public opening, such as if we have three-story walk ups where will the chickens go? I explained that every apartment had a private terrace and a communal courtyard, and I had stacked them in a manner so that there were more spaces. I said, look, this is where your children will be playing, you will be growing vegetables, and your chickens will roam. And they accepted it. The tragedy is that when you design something for the government, it seldom reaches the target population. Because it was new, it became very popular.
Figure 4. Exterior view of Anguri Bagh, Lahore (1965). Photograph courtesy of Lari and Associates.
That I was able to do this when I was very young is remarkable. I have really been very lucky. I didn’t want my architectural practice to be a factory, churning out buildings. And that opened up the world of research for me, because there were times when there was no work in the office. We were sitting around, so we started documentation and research.
KR: The Heritage Foundation, which you co-founded in 1980, set a new direction for non-governmental organizations in Pakistan. You can study the built heritage of Sindh through your work, from the Samma period in Makli (1351-1524) to the British Raj (1858-1947) in Karachi.
YL: At the time there was only the department of archeology, established it in 1904 by Lord George Curzon, then the Viceroy of India, doing historical conservation and documentation. I had become interested in urban heritage, particularly through my work on the Walled City, Lahore. In addition, there were models around the world doing amazing work, such as the Freedom Trail through Boston (1951) and the National Trust in the United Kingdom (1895). I felt that Karachi was losing a lot of its past. Perhaps it was still too close to Independence, and there was a love-hate relationship with British monuments. Karachi, a Raj city, had little value, especially in comparison with Lahore, a Mughal city.
“I realized that it was not only the elite or the educated who are concerned about the built environment, everyone will be if you give them a chance.”
In the 1980s, we started documentation in Karachi, which resulted in The Dual City: Karachi During the Raj, co-authored with my son, Mihail Lari. Now we have almost sixteen hundred structures classified and documented, but they’re still in a highly dilapidated condition and at risk of being demolished. That’s a great tragedy. In 1994, I was able to get a Law for Urban Heritage passed. Earlier laws were only there for monuments and historical sites, but urban heritage—such as in Thatta and Lahore—was not covered at all (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Windcatchers over residential buildings in Thatta, c. 1995. Photograph courtesy of the Heritage Foundation.
My architectural practice ended in 2000, I haven’t built anything since the ABN Amro Bank (now Faisal Bank) in Karachi. In 2001 Karavan Karachi was begun, as a heritage festival to raise awareness on the over six hundred historic sites in the city. It was a remarkable series of events, planned and executed by volunteers, from the Governor of Sindh to ordinary citizens. Every Sunday, we’d meet at a new site, where there would be public lectures and cultural events. Everyone attended, mothers with young children, college students, performers, and so on. I realized that it was not only the elite or the educated who are concerned about the built environment, everyone will be if you give them a chance. I remember a policeman remarking that usually the roads were blocked off for VIPs, but now they were closed for common people to enjoy the city!
In 2003, Ingeborg Breines, then country director of UNESCO, invited me to act as National Advisor for World Heritage at Lahore Fort (Figure 6). She is someone who really practices what she believes in, about women’s rights, environmentalism, heritage. We were able to get unpublished drawings from the British period photographed and digitized. We also carried out almost complete documentation of the “as built” drawings of the fort, in addition to co-authoring the Master Plan. I had access to all parts of the fort and it was wonderful to walk on the pathways of the Mughal queen, Noor Jahan.
Figure 6. Red Fort, Lahore (2019). Photograph courtesy of Kishwar Rizvi.
The authors would like to thank Yasmin Bergemann and Zaib un Nisa Aziz for their assistance in the transcription and translation, respectively, of these articles.
