Yasmeen Lari in conversation with Sumayya Vally – The Understory of the Understory



The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory
5th & 6th December 2020
Online at themind.fish

The Understory of the Understory is the fourth instalment in an ongoing series of festivals on consciousness and intelligence across species, part of the Serpentine’s General Ecology project. With The Understory of the Understory, we go to that place which is simultaneously ground, land, soil and Earth, that is to say, the place where diverse species come together, collaborate, communicate and constitute one another but also where complex systems of redistribution of toxicity, logics of extraction and geopolitics meet.

Yasmeen Lari and Sumayya Vally, Letters to architecture, letters to the planet and a love letter to a young architect of colour

Ecological and architectural entanglements between India-Pakistan, Sub-saharan Africa and London. In this conversation, Sumayya Vally and Yasmeen Lari talk about Lari’s life, work and evolution as an architect, researcher and activist.

Sumayya Vally
Sumayya Vally is the Founder and Principal of the interdisciplinary research and architecture studio, Counterspace. Her design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. She is in love with Johannesburg. It serves as her laboratory for finding speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. Vally is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus 1.
@sumi_v

Yasmeen Lari is the first woman architect of Pakistan. After initial schooling at Queen Mary’s, Adbistan-e-Soofia and Kinnaird College, Lahore, Pakistan, she graduated from Oxford School of Architecture (now Oxford Brookes University), U.K. in 1963 and was elected Member of Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1969. As President of Institute of Architects Pakistan (IAP) and first chairperson of Pakistan Council of Architects and Town Planners, Lari was instrumental in bringing about recognition for the professions of architecture and town planning through PCATP Ordinance 1983. In 2006, in recognition of her services to the architectural profession and heritage conservation, she was awarded the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, one of the highest civil awards, by the Government of Pakistan. She established Lari Associates, Architects, Urban Designers in 1964 and took on the challenges as an architect dealing with issues in an industrially less developed country – from mud buildings, low income housing and improvements in spontaneous settlements to state of the art buildings. She retired from architectural practice in 2000 to devote full time to writing and heritage-related work.She is a member of Punjab Government Steering Committee for Lahore Fort and Shalamar Gardens, member of UNESCO Consultative Committee for Moenjodaro, Board Member of Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA) and Trustee of Transparency International Pakistan. She is the author and co-author of several books including a publication on the historic Governor House, Lahore.
@ylari @barefoot.in.pakistan

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