Yasmeen Lari is Pakistan’s first woman architect and a pioneering advocate of what she calls “barefoot social architecture”—an approach that empowers marginalized communities to rebuild their lives with dignity through sustainable, low-cost, and locally rooted design. Co-founder of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, she has dedicated decades to both the conservation of her country’s architectural heritage—from World Heritage Sites in Makli and Lahore to vernacular traditions—and to developing new models of architecture in service of social and ecological justice.

Winner of the 2023 RIBA Royal Gold Medal and the 2017 Curry Stone Prize, Lari has become internationally celebrated for her work teaching traditional building techniques to women in rural Pakistan, enabling communities to recover and regenerate after disasters. Her projects demonstrate that design is not a privilege for the few, but a vital necessity for those living on the margins—where, as she reminds us, “the more meager the resources, the more attention is needed to create well-designed environments.”

At In Focus: Radical Repair, Lari’s keynote traced her vision of architecture as a tool for resilience, justice, and transformation—one that insists on raising populations above poverty while cultivating a more equitable and sustainable future.