Yasmeen Lari wins the Lisbon Triennale Millennium bcp Award
The Lisbon Architecture Triennale is proud to announce that Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari has been awarded the 2025 Achievement Award. Her career, spanning more than six decades, stands as a powerful testament to the role architecture can play in improving living conditions, challenging inequality, resisting ecological collapse, and building a more just future.
“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 mobilising villages – one village at a time.”
Yasmeen Lari
Born in 1941 in Pakistan, Lari studie d architecture at Oxford. After graduating, she returned to her home country and established her own practice, becoming Pakistan’s first female architect.
Following a successful career based in Karachi, Yasmeen Lari retired from her architectural firm in 2000 and focused on the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, dedicated to preserving and promoting local, sustainable and vernacular architecture. In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in 2005, Lari once again expanded her practice, embracing what she describes as a bottom-up, “humanistic humanitarian action” – and rewriting the role of contemporary architecture, especially in areas deeply affected by social and climate-related crises.
In response to the catastrophic floods that struck Pakistan in 2022, Yasmeen Lari pledged to help build over one million houses, guided by her “four zeros” philosophy: zero carbon, zero waste, zero donors, and zero poverty. Achieving this goal without relying on donors, philanthropy, or external financial aid makes Lari's later career truly unique.
Yasmeen Lari will be present at the opening days of the Triennale 2025 (02 to 04 October), where she will deliver a public lecture and receive the Lisbon Triennale Millennium bcp Awards trophy, designed by Álvaro Siza and crafted from waste marble sourced in Estremoz, Portugal.