{"meta":{"version":"2.1","_links":{"self":{"href":"https://api.vam.ac.uk/v2/object/O1803094"},"collection_page":{"href":"https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1803094/"}},"images":null,"see_also":null},"record":{"systemNumber":"O1803094","accessionNumber":"E.247:1-26-2026","objectType":"Model","titles":[{"title":"Model of Pakistan Chulah","type":"generic title"}],"summaryDescription":"Yasmeen Lari is considered the first woman in Pakistan to lead a major career in architecture, starting her Karachi practice, Lari Associates, in 1964 following training in the UK. Lari’s early work ranged from Pakistan’s first public housing scheme (Anguri Bagh, Lahore, 1973) to landmark commercial buildings (the Finance and Trade Centre, Karachi, 1983-1989.) In 1980, she co-founded the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan (HFP) to safeguard Pakistan’s cultural heritage. Following the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, Lari disavowed high-carbon footprint architecture and shifted her practice to exclusively low-cost designs with natural materials, that serve and empower “the poorest of the poor.”  Lari’s work speaks to urgent debates about architecture in the context of the climate crisis, advocating for an approach that serves UN Sustainable Development Goals. Now in her 80s, Lari continues to lecture internationally and tour Pakistan with HFP. In 2023, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) awarded Lari the Royal Gold Medal in recognition of her self-built, low carbon design initiatives.  \n\r\nThe ‘Pakistan Chulah’ design and programme exemplifies Lari’s philosophy of what she calls “barefoot social architecture”, a low-impact design approach that aims to produce buildings that ‘tread lightly’ on their natural surroundings and provide ecological and social justice to marginalised communities. Her practice offers a model for design that is rooted in revisiting traditional ecological knowledge. “It’s not as if these techniques didn’t already exist in our country, or that I have introduced something entirely new,” Lari comments, “it is just that they were not being used to their potential.”   With an approach rooted in using local, natural materials and craft techniques that are widely accessible to rural communities in Pakistan, Lari’s project offers a sustainable model of ‘build-it-yourself’ designs with which communities can build independent livelihoods. ‘This is where architecture is giving agency to those who have no voice otherwise,” Lari has reflected, and where, in her words, the project’s scale of social impact reveals “why we have to have a change in mindset as to what we believe an architect is, or could be, or should be.’  \n\r\nIn early 2013 Yasmeen Lari initiated the ‘Pakistan Chulah’ programme with the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, with the aim of improving the health and livelihoods of women in remote rural areas of Pakistan, where an estimated four in five women lack access to a clean, safe cooking resource while being the sole cooks for their families. This project comprised an initiative to redesign traditional cooking stoves, alongside a training programme to empower networks of women to learn to build these themselves and earn a living by making stoves for others. Lari’s design approach focused on several functional improvements in the hygiene and safety features of the stoves, alongside design features that improved their climate resilience, especially during periods of monsoon season flooding.  The design was also underpinned by a resourceful use of locally available natural materials for hand-built earthen construction, such as earth, lime, dung and straw. The chulah is built entirely with sun-dried mud bricks and rendered with lime. The mud plaster is usually mixed with straw and cow dung; the addition of lime strengthens the structures. \r\n","physicalDescription":"Unfired clay model of a chulah stove set on a base with a wall behind decorated with flowers and birds. 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