YASMEEN LARI, GREEN ARCHITECT

The career of Pakistan’s first professional female architect gets an appreciative overview.

Pointedly characterizing her subject as a “great listener” and consequently a “great learner” even in childhood, Abbas follows Yasmeen Lari’s rise to “starchitect” status as she worked with “fickle and tough” clients on new projects in Karachi—and then switched her focus to preserving her country’s historical buildings. In the wake of the massive 2005 earthquake that struck northern Pakistan, she began studying traditional vernacular structures in towns and villages. Exchanging concrete, glass, and wood for bamboo, mud, and lime, she went on to design new ones more resistant to natural disasters and, in a grassroots initiative she’s dubbed “barefoot social architecture,” to train local residents to build them (40,000 so far). A strong, confident presence both in Hadadi’s brightly hued collage illustrations and the photo spread at the end, Lari actively scrapes and washes aging walls, works intently with plans and models, and dances her way past high-rises and mud-walled huts and through ornate arches and bamboo thickets. The book ends with a regal illustrated portrait and recent photographs of Lari leading an intent class of traditionally clad female students. “Yasmeen had tackled every challenge that came her way. She’d listened to the pleas of the planet and the woes of the villagers. Now the world listens to Yasmeen.”

An inspiring portrait of a woman whose achievements have been both literally and figuratively groundbreaking.