Hasta La Ideas

Yasmeen Lari, Pakistan’s first female architect, has been awarded the Jane Drew Prize 2020 for raising the profile of women in architecture.

Aged 79, Lari has continued to dedicate her life to architecture since closing her practice in 2000, advising UNESCO and building homes for tens of thousands of people affected by floods and earthquakes in her home country.

“I am touched and humbled to be included among the galaxy of architects who have received this prize,” Lari said.

Previous winners of the award, which is named for English architect and modernist pioneer Jane Drew, include Odile Decq, Denise Scott Brown, and Amanda Levete.

The Jane Drew Award is part of the Architects’ Journal (AJ) and The Architectural Review‘s W awards series, formally known as the Women in Architecture awards.

Lari is Pakistan’s first female architect

Born in Dera Ghazi Khan, Pakistan, in 1941, Lari grew up in Lahore until she left to visit London at the age of 15. Initially there for a family holiday, she ended up staying and continuing her education in England.

She tried to enrol in architecture school, after her interest was piqued by seeing her father work on development projects in his role with the Indian Civil Service.

“I went for an interview to get admission…and they [asked], ‘Well, can you draw, young lady?’ And I said I couldn’t,” Lari told Jazbah Magazine. “So they [suggested], ‘You better go learn to draw first at an art school.'”

Lari duly studied art for two years, before getting her degree at the Oxford College of Technology, now the Oxford Brookes University School of Architecture.

After graduating in 1964, aged 23, she returned to Karachi in Pakistan and opened her practice Lari Associates, becoming the country’s first female architect.

Pioneered her “barefoot social architecture”

As well as fighting to be respected as a woman in an industry dominated by men, she pioneered her philosophy of “barefoot social architecture” that helped communities in socially and environmentally sustainable ways.

In 1973 she designed Pakistan’s first public housing scheme, the Anguri Bagh project in Lahore.

She designed terraces that were open to the sky, so the women who moved here from their previous flood-prone houses would have outdoor space for their chickens and children.

Her self-financing Lines Area Resettlement programme in 1980 was an ambitious project to rehouse 13,000 people in self-built homes without displacing them from where they lived and worked.

Lari also designed landmark buildings in Pakistan, such as the Finance and Trade Centre and the Pakistan State Oil House in Karachi.

Together with her husband, Suhail Zaheer Lari, she founded her humanitarian and conservation project the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan.

Closed her practice to focus on humanitarian work

She closed her practice in 2000, and devoted her energy to using her experience in building with bamboo and mud to help when a series of man-made and natural disasters devastated the region.

When the Pakistani Armed Forces were fighting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2007, Lari built community kitchens in refugee camps for those displaced by the conflict.

Using bamboo, a fast-growing and sustainable material, she helped create 40,000 homes over four years, after floods hit the area in 2010. The structures withstood further floods in 2012 and 2013.

When earthquakes shook the country in 2013 and 2015, Lari designed earthquake-resistant shelters with cross-braced bamboo frames.

Designed a life-saving stove for women

“I often tell my colleagues, ‘let us not treat disaster-affected households as destitute, needing handouts’,” Lari told Reuters in 2014. “Rather let us give them due respect and treat them as we would a corporate-sector client.”

In 2018 she won the World Habitat award with her design for a fuel-efficient chulah, or stove, which emits none of the toxic smoke that was blighting Pakistani women’s health.

Lari will be speaking at the W Lunch at Battersea Arts Centre in London on Friday 6 March.

Main image courtesy of Heritage Foundation of Pakistan.

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The film, directed by Ian Pons Jewell and created by DDB Chicago, feels like a return to the brand’s Taste the Rainbow ads of days gone by – think sentient beard and singing rabbit.

In the ad, a butler is sent to fetch more yoghurt-covered Skittles, which means a trip to the kitchen and a dark, if strangely erotic encounter with the milky creature that lives there.

For anyone that’s familiar with Skittles’ previous ads, this is business as usual, but there’s definitely a slightly more disturbing edge to this incarnation of Taste the Rainbow than we’ve seen before. You have to congratulate DDB Chicago with getting away with something so unashamedly odd, but also for cleaving to the philosophy that started the whole Taste The Rainbow thing in the first place.

As Scott Vitrone, one of the original creators of the campaign, told CR in an oral history of the brand’s ads: “Skittles had a history of magic and the rainbow and weirdness. It was inherent to the brand and that’s why it worked.”

Credits:
Agency: DDB Chicago
Director: Ian Pons Jewell
Production company: Reset

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A bubblegum-pink kitchen and stripey watermelon-green floor are some of the features inside this Tokyo apartment, which designer Adam Nathaniel Furman has completed in a sugar-sweet colour palette.

Described by Adam Nathaniel Furman as a formerly “claustrophobic” space, the Nagatachō Apartment had previously contained several cramped rooms that were arranged around a long, narrow corridor.

The ceilings were also “touchably low” and tiny, deep-set windows meant that little natural light was reaching the living spaces.

It’s owners – a retired expat couple – therefore tasked Furman with redesigning the home to be “a place of happiness, joy and lightness”.

“As I have quite a colourful portfolio of work, I’m very lucky to generally attract clients who are super passionate about experimenting with design and colour, and this project was no exception,” the London-based designer told Dezeen.

“My initial proposal was more conservative (aesthetically speaking), and I was pushed to do more of a ‘total’ design, in which a full – but gentle – atmosphere was created at every level of the flat.”

Furman first went about reconfiguring the 160-square-metre apartment to form larger and more open rooms. At the heart of the plan is now a candy-pink kitchen suite, an element that encouraged the designer and clients to nickname the home “bubblegum flat”.

Slim, blue tiles have been arranged to create a herringbone-pattern splashback, while stripes of “watermelon-green” vinyl feature on the floor.

The kitchen connects to a small breakfast nook, and a dining room that’s been finished with lilac carpet which “has the feel of sponge cake and looks like icing”.

“A lot of the way I described the project as I was developing it was through taste and references to cooking and food, so that the colour scheme became a matter of choosing ingredients for a beautifully calibrated visual feast,” he explained.

Vivid colours have been applied throughout the rest of the apartment, particularly in the bathrooms where purple, blue and milky-orange tiles clad the walls.

Fixtures like tap faucets and towel rails have been completed in a “zesty” lemon-yellow.

“I have such strong memories of the mosaics in some [Japanese] bathrooms from the ’60s when I was a child, all lilacs and pale peaches and light blues, and I absolutely had to recreate my own version of that here,” said Furman, who spent some of his childhood in Japan with his maternal grandmother.

In the bedrooms, turquoise and lime-green textured wallpaper forms a border around the lower half of the walls.

Although the apartment diverts from what could be considered a traditional Japanese aesthetic, Furman says he simply takes a “slightly different mix” of references from the country.

“I was lucky enough to experience Japan as a child, so I was exposed to a domestic, day-to-day, no doubt messier, personal, commercial (toys, tv, shops) and un-curated version of the place that I very much loved,” Furman explained.

“I also remember the rise of ‘cute’ culture and the intriguing and often uncanny takes on gender that involved, which used to transfix me, and the colours that were so intrinsic to those gender-plays,” he continued, “so [the apartment] is a mix”.

The bold colour palette of the Nagatachō Apartment extends to the rest of Adam Nathanial Furman’s projects.

Earlier this month, the designer brightened a maternity centre in London with a “flowerburst” mosaic.

Last year he also produced a pair of bold, cartoonish cabinets that are inspired by Nakano Broadway mall, a shopping centre in Tokyo famous for its extensive selection of anime items and video games.

Photography is by Jan Vranovsky unless stated otherwise.

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We’ve selected five roles in PR and marketing available on Dezeen Jobs this week, including positions with Adjaye Associates and WilkinsonEyre.

Marketing lead at Adjaye Associates

Adjaye Associates is looking for a new projects and marketing lead to join its office in New York. The British-Ghanaian architect recently designed a curved pink-tinted concrete building for luxury retailer The Webster’s flagship store in Los Angeles.

Find out more about this role ›

Marketing coordinator at WilkinsonEyre

WilkinsonEyre designed a modular village of cross-laminated timber pods arranged in clusters to accommodate undergraduate students and visitors to the Dyson Institute. The firm has an opportunity for a marketing coordinator to join its team in London.

Find out more about this role ›

Press officer and editor at Carlo Ratti Associati

Carlo Ratti Associati is inviting applications for a press officer and editor to join its team in Turin, Italy. The Italian architect and MIT professor aimed to provoke debate about surveillance with his Eyes of the City exhibition in Shenzhen, which uses facial-recognition technology and artificial intelligence to track visitors.

Find out more about this role ›

Marketing assistant at Toogood

Design duo Faye and Erica Toogood’s studio is hiring a studio manager and marketing assistant in Shoreditch, London. Faye Toogood collaborated with Cc-tapis to create the Doodles collection, which comprises six hand-knotted rugs with paint-like splotches and scribbles by Toogood.

Find out more about this role ›

Marketing and communications manager at Sheppard Robson

Sheppard Robson designed the Nelson Mandela children’s hospital in Johannesburg, a 200-bed, eight-theatre paediatric facility made from orange bricks that reference the region’s red-clay soil. The practice, is seeking a business development marketing and communications manager to join its studio in London.

Find out more about this role ›

See all the latest architecture and design roles on Dezeen Jobs ›

The post Five impressive PR and marketing roles available in the architecture and design industry appeared first on Dezeen.

For industrial designers, craftspeople, or anyone who creates, the question of what can be reused becomes more pressing by the day. Plastics, paper, metal, food-waste, textile, wood, glass, concrete, etc., when a product or a material is all used up, those of us living and working in this culture of waste are left with little support from industrial or government infrastructure. While for some materials the possibility of reuse or recycling is clear and attainable, for so much of the ever growing mountains of material we produce daily, the question remains unanswered.

Of course, the truth is that there is no end. Nothing is ever truly used up. One can refer to thermodynamics or ecology to understand that nothing every really leaves, it just changes.

The key considerations for designers then become how material changes overtime, and how it might be reused or recycled. Just as burning fossil-fuel releases carbon into the atmosphere, industrial production and consumption has negatively impacted the environment to the detriment of our species, and pretty much all others. As we become more aware of the negative impacts of production, consumption and disposal, it behooves designers to examine any and all material as usable. Designer and material researcher Carissa Ten Tije provides us with a surprising and poetic example of that kind of material consideration.

With her project “Bottom Ash” that was presented during lasting year’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, Netherlands, Ten Tije made a statement about the extreme possibilities of reusing material. When one incinerates an object, it would be understandable to think that the object has been pretty much obliterated. But of course there are remnants. In addition to the gasses produced during incineration, there is also ash.

Bottom ash, in the case of Carissa Ten Tije’s bench. As reported in the project’s description, “Bottom ash is the non-combustible residue after household waste is burned in waste-to-energy-plants. In the Netherlands one person’s household waste produces an average of 57[.]5 kg of bottom ash per year.” In Europe, waste-to-energy burning is common practice for all the waste that cannot be recycled and ultimately results in a lot of ash being produced.

“Incinerator (waste-to-energy plant; waste incineration plant), Industry park Höchst, Hesse, Germany. Presumably the largest incinerator in Germany with a capacity of about 675,000 tons per year.” Photo by Norbert Nagel

Ten Tije considered the sizable amount of waste material from waste-to-energy burning, and recognized it has potential for design for industrial production. While waste-to-energy plants already use trash as fuel for the production of energy in Europe, Ten Tije has shown that the excess ash can be used as well. Many natural material resources, even those that appear to be endless, are becoming increasingly scarce. And yet Ten Tije’s Bottom Ash shows that even material that seems entirely spent can still be recycled for production.

The bench that Ten Tije constructed brings the idea to life. Minimal and modular in construction, the design alludes to its origins in its color and texture. While recycled material products often forcibly remind users of their recycled-material-origin, Ten Tije’s bench doesn’t necessarily presume that the user is focused on the production story behind the material.

Yet knowing where a design came from, and where it is going, should be on the minds of all designers. Where as more and more concerned customers are becoming interested in ecological-value of the products they buy, the consideration how designers manifest product life, aesthetically, is important to consider. Here Carissa Ten Tije is successful in creating a subtle story for this object, that in its material construction is defiant of the idea that any material is unusable or utterly spent. One that hopefully inspires other designers to question the materials they need and remind them that nothing comes from nothing.