Impact Lecture: Barefoot Social Architecture with Prof. Yasmeen Lari

Join Postdoc researcher Ena Lloret Fritschi as she hosts professor Yasmeen Lari to present her Impact Lecture: Barefoot Social Architecture.

Yasmeen Lari studied at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) before returning to Pakistan, where she began her practice in the 1960s . She made her name with a number of prestigious state commissions in the 1980s, but also focused attention on low-income housing projects that favoured low-rise high-density over the fashion for concrete-slab blocks. In 2000, she retired, primarily to focus on writing books about Pakistan’s architectural history but also to devote energies towards the Heritage Foundation, which she had founded with her husband in 1980.

Since 2005, a series of natural disasters and regional conflicts have kept Lari and the Heritage Foundation active with a focus on developing agile techniques with local materials and techniques: specifically bamboo, mud and lime, always following the principles of low cost, zero carbon and zero waste.In 2010 they developed designs for modular community centres raised on stilts, which address the challenges of floods, earthquakes and local climactic conditions. In her lecture she will outline these works and the efforts of the foundation to develop programmes of what she calls “barefoot social architecture” for impoverished communities, running training programmes to get rural villagers to make building components and products that they can sell on to each other for community building.

The Impact Lecture Series are organised by NCCR Digital Fabrication with the aim of openly discussing the social, economic and environmental impacts of new digital technologies in real-world applications.