A proud moment for Pakistanis everywhere as Yasmeen Lari, Pakistan’s first-ever female architect, has just been awarded the prestigious Jane Drew Prize 2020 for her contribution to raising the profile of women in design and architecture.
The prize is named after Jane Drew, an advocate for women in a male-dominated profession. Other previous winners of the award include Odile Decq, Grafton Architects’ founders Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, Kathryn Findlay of Ushida Findlay and Eva Jiřičná.
The 79-year-old is now among the ranks of other famous award winners such as Amanda Levete, Zaha Hadid, Denise Scott Brown and Elizabeth Diller.
Yasmeen Lari – A Profile
Yasmeen Lari is well-known and respected for designing landmark buildings in Karachi, where she set up her own practice after graduating from Oxford Brookes’ architecture school in 1964. Her buildings include the Finance and Trade Centre (1983-89) and Pakistan State Oil House (1985-91).
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Before these, she had designed the Anguri Bagh housing project in Lahore in 1973 and Lines Area Resettlement in 1980 – a complex of self-built housing for residents of a sprawling settlement covering more than 80ha of Karachi. Yasmeen later turned to ‘barefoot’ architecture, which aimed to tread lightly upon the plan and provide environmentally sustainable and participative solutions to lift up marginalized communities.
She started working with bamboo in 2007, providing community kitchens to refugees of the conflict in Swat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and, later, building community centers on stilts after floods hit the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh provinces.
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How wonderful! Congratulations!!
Hearty Congratulations! Remarkable achievement. ? feeling so proud .
We are proud and happy to be associated with a house she designed for my father in law and mother some 50 years ago. The space she created had worked very well for us and for the interior designers who now live in it & love it.??
MashaAllah.Great achivement.I must congratulate Yasmeen Lari sahiba.
Feeling very proud that we have Pakistani women like her.congratulations
Very proud. May her student be identical to her or from her family . In sha ALLAH
??? Kudos to Yasmeen Lari for winning the Jane Drew award! As someone just a few years older, I can attest that both of us entered the arduous training for the profession at a time when – except in Scandinavia – about one architect in 100 was a woman.
The incomparable Denise Scott Brown was the only female teacher i had in seven years of.grad school in arch., planning, and civic design at Yale and Penn. A couple of young women from ‘the sub-continent’ studied design with Lou Kahn when i did, so i know that both Pakistan and India were at least “letting a few of us through” back then.
Lari’s work with “barefoot architecture” is esp. welcome, since certainly in this field – but ideally in almost all pursuits, as The Golden Rule has so long counseled us! – doing all that one can to “think like the user/s” leads to the best results for all. — Cindy Cisler, NYC