Designing With Local Context
Yasmeen Lari as she presented during the APTI conference College of Fellows keynote
A few weeks ago I attended my first Association of Preservation Technology conference, held in Seattle. One of the keynote speakers at the conference was Yasmeen Lari, winner of the RIBA 2023 Royal Gold Medal. Yasmeen is Pakistan’s first female architect and has done amazing work to bring affordable home building to her home country. Seeing first hand the issues of global warming on the environment and increasing displacement of people from their homes, she set up the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan along with her husband to research and safeguard Pakistan’s cultural heritage.
Yasmeen’s lecture was titled “Lessons from the Global South: Community Engagement for Decolonization and Decarbonization of the Built Environment." The most notable takeaway and a primary focus of her talk was her zero carbon footprint home designs that use the locally sourced materials of bamboo, lime, and mud that have led to what the website says is 40,000 green shelters, but I thought in her presentation said there were far more shelters constructed to date. Her model is simple—teach locals how to build these simple designs that provide all the basic needs for daily living with materials sourced locally to keep them affordable and sustainable. Then those project leads go out into communities and help locals build their own homes.
Exterior walls of the Lone Oak restaurant (image courtesy of History Nebraska)
Thinking more locally, while the Midwest doesn’t have ample supplies of bamboo and lime, what we do have readily available is straw, a material that has been used for over a century to construct buildings. Just outside Lincoln, we had a locally designated restaurant building, the Lone Oak, made of strawbale construction that stood for many decades. There are more recent projects using strawbale construction including a really neat project in the small town of Cody, Nebraska, population 150. The students of Cody-Kilgore high school worked to construct a strawbale building to house a new grocery store. The town was 80 miles from the nearest grocery so the project filled a major need for the community, gave students an opportunity at entrepreneurship as they ran the grocery, and used sustainable and affordable methods in the process.
While traveling for this conference I was also reading People, Planet, Design by Corey Squire which will be the December episode for Booked on Planning. It’s a really great book and I would recommend anyone interested in sustainability, design, or urban planning check it out. We all interact with buildings daily, so a lot of the content is applicable whether or not you are an architect. The premises of the book fit so well into the talk by Yasmeen because it’s all about designing buildings in a more sustainable way that uses materials that don’t require carbon intensive extraction, that puts a primacy on using local materials, and that teaches architects how to return to the basic principles of design to ensure the building functions well without excessive HVAC or electricity.
It will be interesting to see where the industry goes, but with the impacts of climate change and the drivers of it becoming more evident, it seems architecture and the construction industries are starting to look back to more traditional building methods for solutions. While some professionals are moving down the high tech path, hoping new innovations and solutions will be the fix, others are realizing that we don’t need to overcomplicate things and maybe taking a step back to look at what worked before technology started harming our environment is the way to go.
