Cambridge University, United Kingdom, June 2023

Sumayya Vally
It's such an honour to be having this conversation with you, and to have spent the morning with you here in Cambridge.

Yasmeen Lari
Thank you.

SV
I really enjoyed you taking me through the college. And to be reminded—ten years after I shared your home in Karachi while we worked together on the restoration of a mosque in the Makli Necropolis—of just how young you truly still are, and how much energy you have.

YL
You're doing phenomenal work yourself. It's quite amazing.

SV
I was also reminded of a time when we were in a lot of communication during the height of COVID. You started to express that you were feeling that it was urgent for this message—the message that is our work—to come out into the world and to be propagated. You said you felt that young architects needed to take up the mantle and really start to change the field. I remembered a letter that you wrote for The Architectural Review. You addressed it, "Dear Young Lady.” You made it clear that a young female architect of colour is your audience.

You wrote, "I know that you have been tutored to pursue a career of starchitecture. However, I would like to discourage you from following an elitist path, and instead tempt you to espouse Barefoot Social Architecture, which aims at social and ecological justice: a stratagem that I devised as I walked barefoot in empathy with those who are today my fellow travellers. In my country a vast number are without shoes because of lack of resources, but walking barefoot also helps you to respect the soil on which you tread. I am curious as to whether you are dismayed, as I have been, at the damage being caused to the Earth’s ecosystem due to wasteful and highly consumptive ways of living and building in many parts of the world."

I found this so interesting because you are able to see the resource in looking at things differently. Sometimes we look at something and think there's nothing there, or we assume so with communities that are impoverished. You’re teaching us to see that there are entirely different worlds waiting to happen, if we can just see these other worlds. Could you share with us where this ethos started?

YL
I started my career decades ago, last century actually, and I followed a similar path to most architects, as we've all been trained. But a time came when I saw that there had to be different ways of practising this particular field. Pakistan, a resource deficient country, has lots of problems. I found that there are many voids, if you like, where architects can play a role. Also, there's a whole tradition of craft in my country, what we call folk heritage, or a built environment that is based on people's own efforts to respond to their own needs.

In 2005, there was a massive earthquake. Something like 80,000 people lost their lives, including many children. 400,000 families were displaced. I didn't think that anybody who's been through that kind of an experience can ever forget what it was like at the time, and how you suddenly realise that everything can end in just a few seconds. You found people were very isolated because this happened up in the mountains, in the North, where there are lots of hills and hamlets. Women, especially, were really, really isolated.

Because I am a woman, I was able to have access to their quarters. I think they taught me a lot about how to deal with life. I found that they lived with the debris. They would sit on it. They had no toilets. (They never had any, actually.) They had no cooking arrangements. Yet whenever I would visit they would take out their best string bed to sit on, their best table, rickety as it might be, their best tablecloth, however faded. They would serve me tea with biscuits and eggs, and that's all they had. I realised how much generosity of spirit there was, in spite of the adversity. I think that's when I learned that people, especially women, have this amazing inner strength. So how do we work towards that? How do we enable them to use their own potential, which is already inside?

SV
That's amazing. Can you tell us about what your childhood was like in Lahore?

YL
I am a little bit embarrassed about the way I was brought up. It was just after Pakistan gained independence from 150 years of colonial rule by the British as an imperial power. This was in 1947. At the time, my father was a part of the highly coveted Indian Civil Service. It was almost exclusively for British officers who'd come from the home country. He had passed the most competitive examination and was sent off to Oxford; of course, he came back with all these fancy ideas about what Europe was, and how the new nations should strive to become as modern as Europe. What was interesting about that time was that even though we had just gained independence, the legacy of colonial rule still lingered on.

SV
It still lingers.

YL
Yes. My family lived in a very exclusive enclave, and we were not really encouraged to mix with others who the British considered to be “native.” Somehow, that went on. In spite of the fact that we were an independent nation, in spite of the fact that my father had become a bureaucrat who was now in the service of a new nation. The traditions still were there.

I think I'm a little bit more sane because of my mother. While my father was deeply influenced by the British, and by the idea of Western civilization, my mother was conservative in a different way. She held onto her traditions. I think that's how I got the benefit of both, if you like. But it also meant that I didn’t truly learn about myself or my own civilization until much later.

SV
Could you reflect a bit on how that came about?

YL
I think this happened once I came back from studying in the UK. I was taught in the same way as everybody else at that time: to aim for the best—in other words, the most iconic structure that one could design. That was what architects were supposed to do. At the time, there was not much realisation around or consideration of what other nations were going through. The subcontinent was still very resource deficient, and it was not on the radar of those who taught, nor of some of us who were learning. When I came back, I got married to Suhail Zaheer Lari. He had studied at Oxford and was very interested in photography and in history; he knew more about the country than I did because his father had been a politician, and had been immersed with the people.

I learned a lot because of him. When we came back to Pakistan, we visited many historic towns and, for the first time, I was exposed to a built environment that was different from anything that I had ever imagined or seen. That had a lasting impact on me. The environments I witnessed in this way were far more humanistic. There was much more interaction. Because of this, people got to know each other and had a support system. The streets were very narrow with open sky terraces. Women were on the uppermost levels so that they could see everything without being exposed. It was a different way of looking at things, and I think that brought home to me that this was where my roots were, and not in the traditions of the West.

SV
This is so interesting, maybe because a big part of the story of finding one’s roots is about refining a kind of vernacular. There's a layer that is about women that is very important—a feminist-led practice invested in generosity and in care. But then there's also a material aspect in your work that is centred around bamboo, lime, and earth. When did you first begin using bamboo as a material? At that time especially, it was uncommon in the architectural canon.

YL
You're absolutely right. No self-respecting architect would have considered bamboo, nor did I. I was just like everybody else. But when I went to the area affected by the earthquake, I found so much debris—stones from collapsed buildings and a lot of wood and big logs. I had to build fast, because Ramadan was approaching and cold weather was coming. So I learned to design buildings that could be earthquake resilient. I learned how to make use of whatever was available.

At that point, I was already retired from architecture. I was not planning to do much else in life except to write books. So I arrived with hardly any resources or workforce. But then suddenly help came—young people, students, and young architects from Pakistan but also from all over the world. It was quite extraordinary. I never felt alone because so many people were there to help. I also remember that almost every building in the area had cracks, and you never knew when it might collapse because of the constant aftershocks.

As an architect, I had never known that humanitarian work is a field in which you never have to do something by yourself. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, you will get help. That in turn gives you a chance to devise innovative ways of dealing with the issue at hand, and to learn from practices local to the area. It's very rewarding.

Now, back to the bamboo. Bamboo has not been used for building in these areas prior, and as I mentioned before, after the earthquakes there was only debris.

By 2009, there had been a rise in militancy and what they called “internally displaced people,” or IDPs. The IDPs were housed in one particular camp in sweltering heat. I was again brought in to help with the situation. The task was to build some community kitchens for the women to cook in. We tried with earth bricks but that was taking too long. We found bamboo growing in the area, so we decided to try it out, as it was quick to use in comparison and these were temporary structures and therefore did not need to be particularly strong. This one situation led me to do a lot of experimentation around how we could use bamboo on a larger scale, and also for roofs in addition to walls.

The following year, a huge flood happened. I had learned a technique of cross-bracing when I was doing earthquake restoration in the North and observing which buildings had survived. I started to do it with bamboo rather than wood. We managed to put up a few hundred living units, and that was my first large-scale work in bamboo. Since then, I've not looked back. I don't use anything else except bamboo, earth, and lime.

SV
You started talking about how collaborative the process became, and I think there's something about your work that is inherently always collaborative. One of my favourite things about staying with you was having a cup of chai with Uncle Suhail, listening to qawwali (Sufi devotional singing) and ghazals (a form of Arabic poetry), and learning so much about the mythologies and vernaculars of Sindh.

There is in your work a collaboration with history itself—with these vernacular practices, many of which are endangered because of colonisation, or they've been stopped completely. But others are carried on in the lives and the bodies of women. Like craft practices, or the ways that women decorate, and so on. There is an aesthetic practice that you're collaborating with women on. But also, think about how the work has scaled—you’ve built over 130,000 chauhras (traditional huts). That work is immense.

I think you enable such an immense participation in your work, but how do you work collaboratively at that scale? It's kind of mind-boggling for an architect who's young and thinking about entering the field. It can be quite overwhelming. But it's so inspiring to see that your work has had such an impact. And I don’t mean in terms of recognition. I'm talking about the number of people it reaches.

YL
It grew like an organic form and took on its own life. Instinctively, because I'm a woman, I thought I could do more with women. I did these things with men as well, of course. They always join in and that’s wonderful, too. But I’ve found that if women lead any kind of effort, it becomes much more meaningful because they put so much of themselves into it. Women have not been given the importance that they deserve historically because people felt that they didn't have the capability, but they absolutely do. And when you provide them an opportunity, they work so hard to prove exactly that. Whatever it is, it’s bound to be a success. And this is literally what happened.

I am hoping that more and more young architects veer towards work that is environmental in nature, and deals with climate change and related humanitarianism. We need designers there. It is design that moulds the whole concept around how to deal with things, especially when resources are limited. It is designers’ job to understand how to make the best of whatever is available, to see context and potential.

Architecture is a tool that can give agency to people who may have no other voice, especially when we design in a manner in which others can also participate. Then there's a sense of ownership and of pride. That's why I prefer to call it co-creation, co-design, or co-building. It's no longer mine. In order to talk about this work I had to lose my ego. That's the first thing that's needed, because you can learn so much just from that.

SV
Absolutely.

YL
We’ve been trained as architects to have full control over everything about what we’re doing, but you have to learn to let go. It's a totally different way of thinking and doing.

SV
There's a great deal that we can learn from the people we build with and for. Like what it is to be in a place, to live with it, to be in dialogue with it, to absorb from it. Then the process of making can also be a convening, a learning from others’ skill, a learning from condition, a learning from weather. If we think about colonial ways of being, all of these things were completely ignored when structures from elsewhere were imposed on our cities.

A big part of the reason I started my practice is because I felt there was so much culture and vibrancy in the city of Johannesburg. The ways that people found to live, despite being so excluded, were ingenious. I'm not romanticising those conditions, but I do think there's much to learn from them as an architect. What we might see as a place of lack can actually be a place of abundant resource.

When you described the building of the chauhras, I remember you telling me that when you're making the mud, there's a suppleness that is needed to prepare it. It's something that the women you were working with feel familiar with. It’s comfortable for them because it's a literacy they have. I think humbling ourselves to understand that there are other literacies in these conditions is something so profound for architects to learn from.

YL
It’s great to see young people being so sensitive to all of this. Design has so much potential power in dealing with contemporary issues such as climate change, but also in figuring out how we can lift people above adversity, through their own resources or through their own capacities. Young architects are far more aware. I think the challenge of my generation is not so much that we were trained in a different manner, but that we came from a different world in which many of today’s issues were acceptable.

SV
You are a pioneer figure for us in so many ways. The first of your kind. I'm wondering, are there any other women who inspired you in this trajectory?

YL
In Pakistan, of course, women have not had the chances that they deserve. But during the independence movement alone, there were many women who fought for this cause in many different ways. In a sense, they're the ones who created the space that my generation of women could start operating in. My generation was probably first or second among women who started to pursue professional careers. And even in those previous generations, there was a value system which now seems advanced for its time. And I think it’s something that we still need to hold close: a humanistic way of doing things that is rooted in benevolence, solidarity, empathy, and supporting each other. I am thinking about the unconditional giving of a mother.

SV
You’ve talked about intergenerational empathy, in which someone who is older and has felt something before is therefore able to empathise with people who are coming after but experiencing something similar. As a woman who has weathered this profession, what message do you have for today’s young women?

YL
Although my generation had some difficulties, you have to remember that those of us who had professional opportunities already belonged to a very privileged class of people. So really, whatever difficulties we had pale in comparison to what's happening to the younger generation of women. I think there are now many more hurdles to cross, and in ways there is more discrimination against women exactly because there are more of them trying to break through. But, on the other hand, I know that women are very resilient. And so I would like them not to lose heart. If you have a dream, follow it and hold onto it. You will succeed.

SV
How beautiful. Thank you.

Sumayya Vally is a South African architect and the founder and principal of the award-winning architecture and research studio Counterspace.

Yasmeen Lari is Pakistan’s first female architect and founder of Heritage Foundation Pakistan.