The Barefoot Architect

At a recent Current Work lecture hosted by The Architectural League, architect Yasmeen Lari asked: “Why is it that architects think they don’t have something to offer to the marginalized?”

Lari is right to point out the effectively indifferent attitude towards these populations. It is currently estimated that 2 percent of the world’s 7 billion people are homeless (about 154 million). Another 1.4 billion people live in homes with dirt floors, 4.5 billion without toilets. This level of poverty is primarily located in the Global South, where Lari predominantly works, but not confined to it.

After a long and prestigious career as Pakistan’s first female architect and a Brutalist starchitect, Lari felt compelled to atone for her own indifference to the poor in her home country. Since retiring in 2000, Lari’s Heritage Foundation practice has used vernacular forms, local materials, and sustainable design practices to elevate Pakistanis—notably women—out of poverty for more than 20 years. Lari’s practice has been awarded the U.N. Recognition Award, and she has won both the Fukuoka Prize and the Jane Drew Prize.

Lari is a rare example of what architects can do to design the world for the better, if the right conditions have been met. The problem for most architects is not that they lack the vision to better the world through their skills, as Lari’s question seems to suggest. It is that they are constrained by the realities of their profession: government bureaucracy, developer predation, and the ever-grinding wheel of capitalism.