An architect has found a way to build flood-proof homes

Yasmeen Lari spent a four-decade career designing award-winning structures out of concrete, glass and steel before stumbling into her ideal material.

It was at a camp for refugees from military conflict in Pakistan’s northwestern Swat Valley. Residents there were struggling to secure bricks and wood to build communal kitchens — until she spotted a nearby bamboo grove.

“Let’s use it,” recalls Lari, who by that time had shuttered her architecture practice to focus on humanitarian work. “I’d never thought of using bamboo in my life.”

The material worked so well that over the last decade, Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, the group Lari started in 1980 to preserve the country’s traditional architecture, has built some 85,000 structures for displaced Pakistanis, including victims of last year’s devastating monsoon rains.

That disaster, the worst flooding in Pakistani history, left a third of the country underwater and destroyed more than 2.1 million homes. The thousands of bamboo structures Lari’s group had erected “all survived,” she said.

How to rebuild quickly, cheaply and well is becoming an increasingly pressing question as climate change intensifies natural disasters. More extreme fires and floods are destroying communities around the world. But so far, most of the emergency shelters that pop up in their aftermath tend to be expensive and inefficient.

These makeshift structures are not built to last, but many disaster victims end up living in temporary encampments for years as they wait for more permanent dwellings to materialize.

Rebuilding is a particularly tough challenge in poorer countries, such as Pakistan, that face the most severe effects of climate change despite emitting a fraction of the world’s carbon.

So Lari is building more bamboo homes. One million more.

These are not disaster relief shelters, she insists, but disaster-resistant homes.

“This country can’t afford the luxury of obsolescence,” said Lari, who earlier this year won an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects. “Whatever we build must be long lasting.”

‘A marvelous material’

When Lari won a 2016 Fukuoka Prize, which celebrated her contributions to the preservation of Asian culture, event organizers asked her where in Japan she’d like to visit. She suggested Kumamoto, in southern Japan, which had just suffered intense earthquakes.

As she walked through its streets, she could spot the bare edges of buildings that plaster had once covered, “but the bamboo was still standing inside,” she said. “And the city is 400 years old.”

Many species of bamboo have been used as a building material in Asia for thousands of years and they are among the world’s fastest-growing plants. A type of grass, bamboo can be ready for harvest in as little as three years, a fraction of the time needed for timber wood to grow. Like manufactured timber, bamboo products can store carbon, and bamboo forests perform well as carbon sinks, meaning they absorb more carbon than they release.

Its strong, consistent fibers give it mechanical properties comparable to the most durable manufactured materials.

“Architects call it natural steel,” said Liu Kewei, an engineer and member of the International Bamboo and Rattan Organization, who has worked on bamboo construction projects from China to Ecuador. “It’s really a marvelous material.”

Bamboo doesn’t always last as long as modern concrete, which has a life span of 50 to 100 years, but it can stand for at least 25. And, according to Lari, it often lasts much longer.

She is one of a growing number of architects pushing a modern bamboo renaissance. In the Philippines, engineering graduate Earl Forlales created a modular home known as Cubo, a reimagining of the traditional bamboo hut that can be constructed in four hours. Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia has used bamboo to create grand latticed structures at numerous eco-friendly luxury resorts. In Bali, architect Elora Hardy and her company, Ibuku, have won plaudits for bending bamboo into sweeping shapes to make bespoke restaurants and houses.

Lari, meanwhile, has traded in the imposing designs of her previous career for simple dwellings that exploit bamboo’s ability to withstand extreme flooding. Bamboo rods may not always be the right building material beyond the tropical and subtropical climates where it grows easily, but in places like Pakistan, where monsoon rains and glacial melt have already displaced hundreds of thousands, it makes sense.

“As it is all tied together, it moves together,” Lari said of her bamboo hut model. “It might swell a bit, but it will come back to its shape.”

A copy-paste design

Lari designed some of Pakistan’s most recognizable buildings during the 1980s and 1990s, such as Karachi’s Finance and Trade Center, a hulking building using passive cooling for natural ventilation, and the Pakistan State Oil House, with its cascading glass facade. She retired from her practice in 2000 to focus on humanitarian work and to preserve historic buildings, a pivot she often says is meant to “atone” for her past.

“Every architect waits for that commission to do something spectacular,” Lari said. “But permission always comes from the rich . . . whether it was the Medicis of Florence, the robber barons of the East India Company, whoever they were.”

Lari’s current project subverts that structure. The bamboo homes, which combine mud and limestone facades with inner bamboo skeletons or bamboo roofs, are designed to be copied and pasted across Pakistan and perhaps, beyond its borders. Her foundation’s free YouTube videos show how to build the homes.

A crew without much technical knowledge can manufacture and assemble the structures’ eight panels and the interior bamboo beams that support them on-site. Lari designed them so that homeowners can easily make repairs and even additions.

“If bamboo is taken care of,” she said, “bamboo can last forever.”

If a flood is coming, homeowners can dismantle the structure’s bamboo skeleton from its permanent foundation and move it to higher ground. Bigger buildings, such as community centers, stand on stilts several feet high.

Lari’s plan to build 1 million homes calls for clusters of about 5,000 dwellings to sprout up across Pakistan’s most flood-damaged throughout this year and next.

Each of these permanent homes would cost just $176, Lari said, providing safe shelter for Pakistan’s flood victims and laying a foundation for sustainable recovery from future climate disasters.

Lari has used “intelligent yet simple” designs to “allow those who are in distress to build for their own needs,” said Simon Allford, chair of the Royal Institute of British Architects Honors Committee, which awarded Lari its 2023 Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. “She is a pioneer in designing architecture for disaster relief.”

Each village shares its resources — community kitchens, vegetable and fish farms, chicken coops and production centers. The clusters also encourage women to be breadwinners and decision-makers — a principle deeply important to Lari, who broke through a male-dominated field to become Pakistan’s first practicing female architect.

The daughter of a colonial officer, Lari said she was privileged to be able to study in Britain, then design homes upon returning to Pakistan. She describes her rise as blessed, but not without challenges. Male colleagues would make her life difficult, placing rickety ladders at job sites. “They wanted to test me,” she said.

Now 82, Lari continues to carve her own way. While others working to rebuild after recent floods are relying on donations, she’s funding her project through microloans meant to jump-start small businesses within the communities, so every cluster of homes will ultimately pay for itself.

“I am no longer relying on outside funding,” she said. “My communities will reach the target themselves with their own resources.”

At Pono village, a pilot cluster in Sindh province, residents have become self-sufficient by producing everything from terra cotta products to goat milk.

It’s a far cry from broad multinational relief efforts. Last year, the Pakistani government estimated it had suffered $40 billion in damage. In August 2022, it launched a response plan to raise $816 million for flood relief. Nearly a year later, it had met less than 70% of its goal.

The World Bank and the government of the Pakistani province of Sindh, for example, have used $500 million in donations thus far to build 380 temporary, high-carbon one-room houses after last year’s floods.

Lari’s foundation has built almost 40,000 homes since the 2022 floods, she estimates. She expects to complete 1 million by 2024 or 2025.

Rising waters won’t stop the project, said Lari. She has plans for future villages that could use moats and bamboo green walls to keep out water. Some are already experimenting with growing crops on raised platforms, inspired by structures at Sindh province’s famed archaeological site of Mohenjo-Daro, a city of at least 40,000 people built around 2500 B.C. and occupied for centuries.

“I’m just learning from everything that’s been there,” said Lari.

“If I could find a way to spread it everywhere — if I could go cluster by cluster, hub by hub, I want to do it that way.”