Zero Carbon, Zero Waste, Zero Donor

Pakistan's first woman architect spent a career on monumental commissions and then abandoned it for what she calls barefoot social architecture: structures the people who live in them can build themselves, from materials within reach, with no contractor and no donor dependency. The Heritage Foundation of Pakistan's OctaGreen shelter is an octagonal frame of eight prefabricated bamboo panels around a central pole, walls sealed with lime-stabilised mud that resists water, and a thatched roof — cool in heat, dry in flood, and cheap enough to replicate. Villagers are trained to build them and then train others, which is how the count reached tens of thousands rather than hundreds; Lari has built over 40,000 low-cost shelters since the 2005 earthquake and set a target of a million after the 2022 floods left a third of the country underwater. She received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2023.