Rebel Architecture for the 99%

I watched Al Jazeera's piece on 'Rebel Architecture', about Yasmeen Lari's ‘Barefoot Social Architecture’. The first Pakistani female architect turned her career from corporate to social architecture. For the past twenty years, she has focused on building homes in Pakistani disaster-affected villages, primarily from floods or earthquakes. Most of her work is fueled by seeking the cheapest possible solution to creating a house, which usually means using local, available resources (salvaged building materials, mud bricks, bamboo, lime, etc.) Lari and her crew of students travel to an affected village and teach the locals how to properly construct the house, so it will resist water infiltration and so on. Then she insists the locals share what they learned with their neighboring communities, passing on the knowledge.

The future architects designing for the 99% shouldn’t be afraid to look to the past for inspiration and technique. I see a beauty in the collaboration between historic vernacular modes of construction paired with a contemporary design approach. Lari says homes made from mud bricks and bamboo deserve the same amount of attention from an architect that a corporate behemoth does.

If architects only design 2% of houses, I'd say Lari is off to a great start by optimizing the design of one home that can be replicated and easily constructed for people in dire situations.