Andrew Ayers: At an age when most people retire, you began the most extraordinary second career putting design at the service of Pakistan’s most destitute communities. How did that happen?

Yasmeen Lari: To a certain extent by accident. You know, I lived in a bubble for the longest time. If you’re successful, you ignore the things that are wrong with the world because you think, “Well, it’s a fact of life, there’s nothing I can do, it’s not my job. I’m an architect, I trained to do higher things.” Then a time came when I felt that wasn’t right. I thought about doctors who take the Hippocratic oath and vow to help humanity. And I thought architects should also do something for humanity, not just for their own egos. I’d been feeling guilty about my privileged background and all the opportunities I’d had that others hadn’t. I’d long been interested in heritage, and I wanted to do more with that. So, when I was 58, I decided to give up my practice. My husband and I had done a lot of heritage research, a process that was also part of my decolonization of my own self.

You went to London on vacation at the age of 15 with your parents, and then stayed on to study architecture at Oxford Polytechnic. During that time you met your future husband, who was reading PPE [politics, philosophy, and economics] at Oxford University.

Yes, that’s right. My father had served under the colonial powers so we all looked towards the West as a mecca for everything. And the realities in Pakistan were not something we talked about much. For example, I’d never been allowed to go to the “native” areas because the British had taught the Indian civil services to be aloof from the natives, like they had been. So there was that kind of divide. After independence, the ruling class retained that aloofness and elitism. Since I was brought up that way, I didn’t know much about myself. Then, in the mid-1960s, I came back and found that things were very different from what I’d thought. My husband began taking me to see old towns and historic sites, and a new world opened up for me. That’s how I got this deep interest in Pakistan’s heritage, to understand who I was. I wrote a book on Thatta, with its wind catchers and mud buildings [Traditional Architecture of Thatta, Lari Research Centre, 1982], and another, with my son, on the history of Karachi, which was essentially a British creation [The Dual City: Karachi During the Raj, OUP, 1997].

What made you choose architecture?

Well it all goes back to my father again. Though very young at the time of partition, he was given enormous responsibilities, first as chairman of the Lahore development authority, and then as the chief planner of four or five desert cities. He would come home and say, “We need a vision for the new country we’re building!” So I thought, “Well I’ll be the one to do it!” [Laughs.] I must have been 13 or 14, and didn’t know a thing about architecture. When we got to England, I tried to gain admission to architecture school. They said, “How old are you?” I wasn’t quite 16. “Well that’s not going to work. And how about your portfolio?” What portfolio? I had a few sketches, that’s all. “Okay young lady, go back to school and learn.” So I went to the Ealing School of Art. I hadn’t passed any secondary exams, so I did those at evening classes. I worked very hard!

Looking at your oeuvre, there’s a striking contrast between your 1970s Angoori Bagh social housing in Lahore, where you used traditional brick and channeled historical precedents, and a late-80s project like Karachi’s Pakistan State Oil House, which is all concrete and mirror glass. It’s like, “Wow! How are these by the same architect?”

[Laughs very hard.] That’s what happens! You’re led into things. I greatly enjoyed doing the social housing — it was the first time I really interacted with women of that class. It’s terrible to say that. Doing that project, I learned so much about the city of Lahore. So you see, I started off okay, then I became well-known, commissions began flowing in, and when that happens you feel the world is your oyster and you can do whatever you want. The 80s were really an age of extravagance where you felt the materials were available, you could import anything. I did the even bigger Finance and Trade building, the largest construction in Pakistan at the time. I was the architect using the most concrete and steel!

What a paradigm shift to now.

Yes. After The Architectural Review gave me the Jane Drew Prize, Oliver Wainwright wrote an article saying, “Well, Yasmeen was a starchitect and now she’s atoning.” [Laughs.] The world has changed, and if you don’t change with it where are we and what’s the future?

Let’s rewind a little. In 1980, long before you retired, you created a heritage foundation with your husband. That was a big step on the path to where you are today.

In the 1970s, Mr. Bhutto’s socialist government nationalized a lot of firms. After that, my husband tried to keep running what was left of his insurance business, but it didn’t work with everything gone, so he decided to sell it and become a writer. That’s when we created the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan. It was a family sort of thing. We put in the money — there was no government money for heritage anyway. My husband was a fantastic photographer, so he went around documenting everything. Pakistan gives you so many opportunities. Nobody realizes that. People focus on the downsides, on what’s not there, but what is there is just unbelievable. You have this fantastic reservoir of built heritage, whether the forts and palaces of the elite or the everyday vernacular, not to mention the crafts and the intangible heritage.

So you retired, decided you were going to write books, and then what happened?

Well, UNESCO asked me to become their national adviser for the restoration of the 17th-century Lahore Fort. I worked with the director of UNESCO’s Islamabad office, Ingeborg Breines, who was amazing, really top class, a feminist. She and I got women to do a lot of craftwork they’d never been allowed to do before. And I got to work with lime and use it properly for the first time. This would turn out to be really useful — lime has become a mainstay of my practice. Since 2000 I’ve not used cement at all. This was long before everyone started thinking about carbon emissions.

Lime production produces carbon emissions, no? You still have to heat it.

Yes. But then it absorbs carbon from the air, so over time it turns out carbon neutral. I also use bamboo, which sequesters a huge amount of carbon. We’re growing it in our villages. It’s highly renewable and does very well as a crop. In Pakistan, it was always considered a poor man’s wood. Whatever the poor do the ruling classes don’t look at — we don’t think it’s something we need bother about. Although bamboo is very common, people didn’t really know how to use it properly to give you the strength and resilience you need. That’s where design comes in. I also had the great fortune to work at the Makli Necropolis, one of the largest in the world, where we restored five monuments dating from the 15th century onwards. There I learned about kashi, an amazing kind of glazed tile work. And I’m proud to say I managed to get women in my beggar communities using these glazed tiles, which were always considered a high craft that only men could practice. There’s so much possibility with craft techniques, which are really something for the people, not for the elite. Somehow we’ve forgotten that. We’ve made them a commodity, but actually they’re the way of life for the poor.

You mention pushing the boundaries for women. How was it for you being Pakistan’s first female architect?

Not so bad really. I only got into trouble when I was fighting for causes. In those days there were so few of us women architects, we all came from privileged backgrounds, so I mean what trouble could we have had? A lot of people think it must be difficult as a woman in a Muslim society, but when you come from that kind of background you have a whole support system behind you. People know who you are. When I look at young architects now, they have a much harder time.

Was that new? You and your sister both had brilliant careers. But did your mother? Did your grandmothers?

With my father and mother we got the best of both worlds, in a sense, because my father had been highly Anglicized but my mother had held onto her traditions very deeply. He may have had more influence on us, but she was the stabilizing force. And she was also very unusual as a woman from that background in that she really supported women’s education.

So clearly there was something about your family that allowed you and your sister to flourish.

Oh absolutely, there’s no doubt. And the work my parents did at the time of partition. My father was the official in charge of Lahore, which was a border city, where a lot of people arrived from India. People were also fleeing in the other direction. It was a terrible time, with massacres on either side of the divide. We heard stories about my father standing in the train station yelling, “You’ll have to go over my dead body to kill those people!” Meanwhile my mother was working in the refugee camps.

Okay, so let’s rewind again. You’d done all this research, you’d learned about lime and bamboo doing restoration work, you’d decided to write books. Then what happened?

I had the privilege of working at the Lahore Fort for three years. I could walk the same pathways that Empress Nur Jahan had walked and imagine what it was like when the court was present. It was an amazing experience. Then the 2005 earthquake struck northern Pakistan. Eighty-thousand people died and 400,000 families were displaced. I heard about it and felt I had to go there to help. I didn’t know if I could do anything — I’d never done any humanitarian work, I’d retired, I had no funding whatsoever, no backup support — but I felt impelled to go.

What did you think you could do?

I thought maybe I could help build houses. I had to learn about how you design for earthquake-proofing, and I wanted to work with the debris, which nobody had done before. The building culture in Kashmir includes a technique called dhajji dewari, a timber cross-bracing with stone and earth infill — if done right, it can make structures very resilient. So I started rebuilding with the local people, using debris. The army was in charge of operations, and when one of the generals asked me what I was going to use, I mentioned lime. He said, “Ah, that’s a very novel idea!” And I replied, “Indeed, it’s been used for centuries.” [Laughs.] When you start this kind of work, you feel you’re going in alone, but suddenly everybody comes to help out. I cannot tell you all the volunteers I got from all over the world. Amazing! Not to mention the generosity of the local people. They would bring a tattered tablecloth out of the debris and offer you World Food Program biscuits and tea and eggs, which is all they had. There’s so much humanism among the poor — I’ve found this all over Pakistan. These disasters teach you that life has no meaning — everything can disappear just like that.

Pakistan seems to have had a lot of disasters in the past 20 years.

Yes, constantly. And we can do nothing to prevent it, because the Global North is doing so much damage, I can’t tell you. But we could at least prepare for it. Glaciers are melting and causing huge flooding on a regular basis — 2010, 2012, 2013, 2022, and now again in 2025. It’s constant. And in between there are heavy rains — it’s a never-ending cycle. Almost the whole country gets affected, by the same river, the Indus and its tributaries. The British also dug canals, which they thought were a great improvement but which I believe are actually making things worse. As a designer I feel it’s my duty to help my country prepare for this.

You’ve said in the past that top-down aid is not the way forward.

Yes, because nobody believes in sustainable kinds of construction, neither the World Bank nor the state nor anybody else, at least in my country. And I don’t believe in high-carbon structures.

Why do you think they’re so reluctant to make that shift?

Because of corruption. If you use high-cost materials it’s easy to pilfer. So nobody wants a situation in which they can’t make money. But if you put power in the hands of those directly affected, no one can do anything, they can’t take anything away from them. So I decided to do it without any funding — it’s a zero-donor-dependent model in every way.

Do you get any pushback from the authorities? Do they see you as a threat?

Well, I’m not doing anything that will affect them. The houses we build borrow a lot of inspiration from vernacular and heritage techniques, so although they’re strong and resilient nobody knows that — everyone looks at the thatched roofs and bio- and geo-sourced materials and assumes they’re very flimsy, so they don’t bother. We’ve been working to lift a million families out of destitution, and I’ve already got them half way up my poverty-escape ladder. You just have to give them the knowledge and they do it themselves.

It’s remarkable the way you’re cutting out all the middlemen: the banks, the construction industry, all those who usually try to profit from these situations.

Since these villages are totally destitute, nobody thinks there’s any opportunity to make money. They’re poor and isolated, so who cares? As well as rural areas I work in cities — there’s my zero-flood, zero-heat-island program. There’s also plenty to do in the slums. But it’s the rural areas that are most affected by the flooding. There are three-million families in my province alone who need help. We’re tackling one million families at a time — we’ve already started work on the next million. It’s very tough because there’s no water whatsoever, but I think we’ll find solutions.

How does it work with your foundation? How many of you are there

That’s a secret because there are so few of us I can’t even tell you! [Laughs.] It’s all about getting the communities to trust us. If they see it’s the Heritage Foundation and Yasmeen Lari they’ll do it, because they know we’re not out to cheat them or take advantage of them. It all started with my little mundane stove, the Pakistan chulah, in 2014. How do you protect stoves from floods? You elevate them on a platform, as I learned from Mohenjodaro, a great Bronze Age city in Larkana. Whatever you’re building, you construct six to eight inches higher than the flood levels, so rather than an open hearth on the floor you elevate it on a platform. There’s a partner organization that promotes brick stoves, but I’m trying to reduce carbon emissions, so mine are in rammed earth, and my women can build them themselves. There’s a chimney to avoid the lung and eye problems, and I designed a storage wall at the rear. My rural women have now built one million of them, and each one is different, personalized and decorated. They’ve created another world for themselves, and in doing so elevated their status.

I believe you further reduced carbon emissions by making your stoves more efficient. What do they burn in them?

The fuel is made out of cow dung and sawdust. We use a lot of waste. You see, that’s why I don’t need outside aid: the materials I use are natural and very inexpensive, and they’re often waste. So what do I need money for? It’s all sustainable, we don’t harm the planet in any way, and this is what they can afford. I’m working with around 18,000 villages, divided into clusters of ten, each of which specializes in a particular kind of product, such as the chulah, or organic soap, or roof thatching, or lime and mud bricks. We call them barefoot products, because my whole idea is to create a barefoot ecosystem — bare-foot economics, barefoot market, barefoot enterprises…

Do you have economists to help with this?

No. Nobody believes in me. They all think I’m crazy. In the beginning I wanted so much for somebody to help me work out how I should do it, but people just said, “You won’t make it. How can you do it without any money?” But it’s working!

What made you believe in it?

You feel it in your bones. I don’t know how to explain it. You dream up something, you get up in the morning and you know you can make it happen. Perhaps it’s my architect’s belief in myself? [Laughs.]

What’s the architecture culture like in Pakistan?

Still very elitist. The scene has grown enormously since I started out. The majority of students are now women. In the late 70s, when I became president of the Pakistan Institute of Architects, I managed to get protection for the title of architect — I had to go through a huge amount of trouble for it, and it was really one of the darkest periods of my life. Anyway, that made the profession more secure for young architects, otherwise it’s just a free for all. I think architecture is a vocation, not a business proposition. It’s about making life better for other people. Some people think that if they do an iconic building they’ll bring people pleasure. But for me my Pakistan chulah is more important because it’s serving a million households. That’s at least eight million people at literally no cost — maybe 3,000 rupees, which isn’t even 10 dollars. On the other hand there’s the Finance and Trade Center, which cost I don’t know how many millions, with 5,000 people working there and maybe another 5,000 passing by. If you weigh them in the balance…

As a last question, may I ask you about your house?

My house is considered an early example of Brutalism in Pakistan. I very much wanted to follow Le Corbusier. I never got to Chandigarh, but I did see Ronchamp as we were coming back from England — we made a special detour. Amazing! I also put in a Frank Lloyd Wright-style cantilever, and modeled the house around a huge mural painting by Shakir Ali, one of the fathers of modern art in Pakistan. We moved in in early 1972. I still live there. My daughter, who was growing up at the time, hated it. It was far too open for her at that age — she didn’t feel she had enough privacy. But my sons and all their friends loved it.

Were you to design your own home today, what would it look like?

Very different. More natural materials... I just cannot think of using concrete now!

After 36 years using it…

But now I know the damage. Today we carry another responsibility, we’ve got to change the way we do things. I’ve got my four zeros: zero carbon, zero waste, zero donor dependency all leading to zero poverty. And I’ve got my three Ds as well: decolonize, decarbonize, and democratize. In the humanitarian field, this means that you give up the international colonial charity model and replace it with one based on empathy, solidarity, compassion, and generosity. The goal is a more egalitarian society — whatever you do, it should be for the common good. You hand control over to communities rather than keeping control yourself. Instead of top-down, it’s lateral — peer-to-peer transfer of knowledge so people can look after themselves. The chulah, for example, is not mine anymore: it’s a co-creation. That’s all you have to understand. A different way of looking at it. With zero ego.