The Lisbon Architecture Triennale has announced Yasmeen Lari as the recipient of the 2025 Millennium bcp Lifetime Achievement Award. With a career spanning over six decades, the pioneering Pakistani architect has consistently demonstrated how architecture can serve as a tool for social justice, environmental resilience, and inclusive development.
Born in 1941, Lari studied architecture at Oxford before returning to Pakistan, where she became the country's first female architect. After establishing a successful practice in Karachi, she retired in 2000 to focus on the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, an organization dedicated to the preservation of local heritage and the promotion of low-carbon, vernacular building techniques.
Architecture has to change if it wants to remain relevant. Our work is not something only for the rich; poor communities all over the world need good design, because it is of even greater value to them. That's why I think my job is to rebuild lives: to create 'poverty escape-ladders' by losing control of the process through co-building and co-creation. We do this by sharing knowledge and mobilizing villages – one village at a time. — Yasmeen Lari
In 2005, following a devastating earthquake, Lari shifted her focus to what she calls "humanistic humanitarian architecture," embracing a bottom-up, community-led approach to rebuilding. Her work gained renewed international recognition after the catastrophic floods in Pakistan in 2022, when she pledged to help construct over one million homes based on her "four zeros" philosophy: zero carbon, zero waste, zero donors, and zero poverty.
Lari's approach—eschewing external funding in favor of empowering local communities through knowledge-sharing and participatory design—has redefined the role of the architect in contexts of crisis and precarity.
Yasmeen Lari will participate in the opening days of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (October 2–4, 2025), where she will deliver a public lecture and receive the Achievement Award trophy, designed by Álvaro Siza and crafted from reclaimed marble sourced in Estremoz, Portugal.
