This year we have the honor to welcome Pakistan’s first female architect, Yasmeen Lari, who will be speaking about groundbreaking work in her lecture “Current Work, The Architect for the Poorest of the Poor”.⁠

SPEAKER INFO

Yasmeen Lari is Pakistan’s first female architect. Born in 1941 in the town of Dera Ghazi Khan, Mrs. Lari spent much of her childhood in Pakistan before moving to London at 15 years old. She graduated from the Oxford School of Architecture in 1964 at the age of 23, and later returned to Pakistan with her husband to open their practice, Lari Associates, in Karachi. Since her retirement in 2000, Mrs. Lari has remained active in the architecture community, serving as an advisor to UNESCO, as the executive director of Heritage Foundation Pakistan, and as the chairperson of the Karavan Initiatives. She is also known for her social justice and advocacy, and as of 2014, had built some 36,000 houses for those affected by Pakistan’s floods and earthquakes.

About the Mumford Lecture:

Each spring, the Spitzer School of Architecture and its Urban Design Program present the Lewis Mumford Lecture and seminar. Named for writer, architecture critic, and urbanist Lewis Mumford, who attended City College, the series invites the world’s most distinguished urbanists to speak freely and publicly about the future of cities and the social purposes of architecture. This series was initiated by the late Michael Sorkin, distinguished professor of architecture and director of the Urban Design Program at the Spitzer School, and curated by him for eleven years.