Yasmeen Lari and Beatriz Colomina winners of the Jane Drew and Ada Louise Huxtable Prizes 2020

Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari and Spanish-American critic and historian Beatriz Colomina have been recognised by this year’s W Awards.

Yasmeen Lari, Pakistan's first-ever female architect, was named the 2020 recipient of the Jane Drew Prize. The 79-year-old Lari was honored with the lifetime achievement prize for raising the profile of women practicing in architecture and design through her work.

Spanish-American architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina is the winner of the Ada Louise Huxtablee 2020 Award, for Contribution to Architecture, which recognises individuals working in the wider architectural industry who have made a significant contribution to architecture and the built environment.

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. Press Opening and Preview of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial. Photograph © Sahir Ugur Eren. Courtesy of Istanbul Tasarim Bienali.

‘I am touched and humbled to be included among the galaxy of architects who have received this prize,’ commented Lari.

The previous winners of the Jane Drew award (Dane was a spirited advocate for women in a male-dominated profession) include, Elizabeth Diller, Amanda Levete, Denise Scott Brown, Odile Decq, Grafton Architects’ founders Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, Zaha Hadid, Kathryn Findlay of Ushida Findlay and Eva Jiřičná.

‘Ada Louise Huxtable was a real force in architecture and I am very honoured to receive this award,’ said Colomina.

‘Huxtable, the Prize’s namesake, made history by being the first full-time architecture critic at a US newspaper when she joined the New York Times, and was later awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1970. The previous winners of the accolade are: photographer Hélène Binet, artist and illustrator Madelon Vriesendorp, sculptor Rachel Whiteread, curator Julia Peyton-Jones and client and architectural patron Jane Priestman.

The prizes are formerly known as the Women in Architecture Awards and is part of the Architects' Journal and Architectural Record's W Awards.

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Yasmeen Lari outside a women’s centre built with traditional materials and techniques and on stilts to survive floods in the Sindh region. Image © Al Jazeera.

Beatriz Colomina. Radical Pedagogies: ACTION-REACTION-INTERACTION. Photograph by Francesco Galli. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia

Yasmeen Lari on site at the Disaster Risk Reduction Centre, courtesy of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan

Arkeoloji Muzesi. 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial. Photography © Muhsin Akgun.

Yasmeen Lari’s Zero-carbon Cultural Centre, Makli, 2015-19. Courtesy of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan

Compilation of exhibition images by the Media & Modernity Program, School of Architecture, Princeton University.

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Yasmeen Lari

Yasmeen Lari. Born in Dera Ghazi Khan in Pakistan, Yasmeen Lari spent some years in Lahore before moving to London with her family at the age of 15. She studied at Oxford Brookes School of Architecture, graduating in 1964 and moving back to Pakistan to open her practice in Karachi. She designed the Anguri Bagh housing project in Lahore in 1973 and Lines Area Resettlement in 1980, a complex of self-built, incremental housing for the residents of the largest informal settlement spread over more than 200 acres in Karachi.

Lari made her name in the 1980s with landmark buildings in Karachi, including the Finance and Trade Centre (1983-89), developed in consultation with the Canadian architect Eva Vecsei, and Pakistan State Oil House (1985-91). She formally retired in 2000, becoming UNESCO’s national adviser for World Heritage Lahore Fort in 2003, but when an earthquake hit the Northern Areas of Pakistan in 2005, Lari turned to strategies of rehabilitation, instituting self-financing models that helped survivors rebuild without government assistance.

Lari started working in bamboo in 2007, providing community kitchens to refugees of the conflict in Swat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, continuing in 2010 when floods hit the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh provinces, to build community centres on stilts that allowed flood waters to flow underneath. ‘Barefoot architecture’ – architecture that treads lightly upon the planet – is the basis of this work, aiming to provide environmentally sustainable and participative solutions to lift up marginalised communities.

BEATRIZ COLOMINA

Beatriz Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture and media. Ms. Colomina has taught in the School since 1988, and is the Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, a graduate program that promotes the interdisciplinary study of forms of culture that came to prominence during the last century and looks at the interplay between culture and technology. In 2006-2007 she curated, with a group of Princeton Ph.D. students, the exhibition "Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X" at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. The exhibition continues to travel around the world, in the Museum of Design of Barcelona and the Colegio de Arquitectos de Murcia, at the NAI Maastricht and Santiago de Chile and Montevideo. Over 100 reviews and articles on the exhibition have been published worldwide. An exhibition catalog is forthcoming from ACTAR.

Her books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), which was awarded the 1995 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects, has already been translated into many languages and is coming out in Spanish and in Turkish. In addition, Ms. Colomina has published Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), which was awarded the 1993 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects; and Architectureproduction (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988). She has contributed to many volumes, including The Banham Lectures, Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change, Beyond Transparency and catalogues of the work of Dan Graham, Muntadas and SANAA, among others. In addition she has published Cold War Hot Houses: Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy, co-edited with AnnMarie Brennan and Jeannie Kim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004; Doble exposición: Arquitectura a través del arte (Double Exposure: Architecture through Art) (Madrid: Akal, 2006), and Domesticity at War (Barcelona: ACTAR and MIT Press, 2007). She was selected to be a Juror for the 2010 Venice Biennale and a juror in the architectural competition for the new headquarters of CAF (Corporación Andina de Fomento), in Caracas, Venezuela. She presented "Women in Architecture," a keynote lecture in the conference Female Forces, 100 year anniversary, at the Royal Academy Copenhagen. In addition to being the Editor of the Multimedia Section of the JSAH (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians) she has written numerous other publications and presented lectures throughout the world, including at MoMA, the MAXXI museum in Rome, the Guggenheim museum, DoCoMoMo in Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Chandigarh, Osaka, Tokyo, Florence, Oslo, Thesaloniki, Patras, Guadalajara, Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Ohio, Pamplona, Porto, Toronto, Houston, Texas AM, Yale, Chicago and Harvard University.