ISLAMABAD: Yasmeen Lari, Pakistan’s first female architect, has won the prestigious Jane Drew Prize awarded by the Architects’ Journal.
“I am touched and humbled to be included among the galaxy of architects who have received this prize,” Lari told Architect’s Journal.
She was born in Dera Ghazi Khan to a family of a developer and was introduced to the building industry very early. She graduated from the School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University.
In 1964, Lari established Lari Associates, Architects, Urban Designers, and has designed some of Pakistan’s most iconic buildings. She is perhaps best known for the Finance and Trade Center and Pakistan State Oil House, both being landmark buildings in Karachi.
She retired from architecture in 2000 to devote her time to writing, heritage-related work, and sustainable design – of which she is a pioneer in Pakistan.
In 2007, she began working with bamboo, an eco-friendly material, which used in projects for Pakistan’s vulnerable groups, such as communal kitchens for refugees in the Swat Valley and community centers to aid persons displaced by floods in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh.
Yasmeen Lari visits the site of one of her bamboo shelter designs in Swat Valley, Pakistan, 2007. (Photo courtesy: Architects’ Digest)
In 2013, she helped design and construct shelters following devastating earthquakes in Balochistan.
In 2006, Lari was awarded Sitara-e-Imtiaz, one of the highest civil awards in Pakistan, for her services to the architectural profession and heritage conservation.
Previous Jane Drew Prize winners include Zaha Hadid, Odile Decq, Grafton Architects’ founders Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, and Eva Jiricna.
The prize was created to promote innovation, diversity and inclusiveness in architecture, is named after British architect and feminist Jane Drew, one of the founders of the modernist movement in Britain, whose work was guided by the principle that architecture should provide a space in which human beings can flourish.
Lari will be accepting the prize at Battersea Arts Center in London on March 6.
