The former “starchitect” who designed gleaming towers for Pakistan’s corporate elite now rebuilds villages completely devastated by natural disasters
BY Lisa Murphy
AS YASMEEN LARI LOOKED out the car window across the Siran Valley in northeastern Pakistan, she grieved for what was no longer a lush vale with rolling green hills, trees and mountains. It was October 2005, and the catastrophic earthquake that had killed some 79,000 people in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan a week earlier had reduced the valley to mud and rubble.
The 65-year-old architect was there to help lead the reconstruction of settlements, but she had never done disaster work before. Lari was filled with anticipation after a two-hour flight from Karachi to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, followed by this five-hour drive.
Darkness had fallen before her driver pulled into a dimly lit army camp where the military rescue operation was based; at almost 5,000 feet it was safer from aftershocks and rock slides than lower ground. When she stepped out of the car she was taken to the commanding officer, who talked to her about the villages that needed immediate help. The enormity of the task ahead hit her full force.
Lari, who had become Pakistan’s first female architect in 1964, was renowned for designing slick towers of glass and concrete. But here, she’d be drawing plans for earthquake-resistant homes using stone and timber debris. Working from a rough cottage near the camp, she’d spend the next four months working with volunteer architects and engineers from Pakistan and abroad.
She would send her drawings with the volunteers, who walked through difficult terrain to reach mountain hamlets. There, they’d assist displaced families with sorting debris and building new and improved homes, even as temperatures plunged and snow began to fall.
“You can’t imagine the desolation,” Lari recalls of those early days in the mountains. Her team members, often the first to arrive on the scene, were greeted with unexpected hospitality, given the circumstances. On one visit, villagers pulled out their best salvaged chairs and table. “They had lost everything,” she says. “But they covered this damaged table with a beautiful embroidered cloth. And then they served us their World Food Programme food: biscuits, tea and eggs.”
With each passing day, Lari was re-engineering her identity—from “starchitect” to humanitarian. The profession had been good to her, but she had become disillusi
