Yasmeen Lari, Green Architect: The True Story of Pakistan's First Woman Architect

by Marzieh Abbas, Hoda Hadadi (Illustrator)

Overview

• Featured title in Shake Up Your Shelves, a campaign to promote inclusive texts in curriculum, library collections, and bookstores   
• Nonfiction Picture Book promotions 
• Featured title on HarperStacks, the school & library marketing digital hub 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063285156
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/22/2024
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	9.90(w) x 10.10(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Marzieh Abbas is an award—winning author who enjoys learning new skills, jumping rope, sipping chai, and observing nature. She is the author of several upcoming children’s books, a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and a graduate of the Children’s Book Academy. She lives in Pakistan.

Hoda Hadadi is a children's books illustrator living and working in Tehran, Iran. She has illustrated more than forty books for children and has won numerous international prizes, including the New Horizons Bologna Ragazzi Award and the Grand Prix of Belgrade.

Editorial Reviews

In this eco-aware, place-oriented picture book, Abbas and Hadadi energetically capture the pioneering career of Yasmeen Lari (b. 1941), Pakistan’s first female architect...Emphatic narration drives home Lari’s impact by piling on staccato text: “Yasmeen rebuilt lives. The villagers were:/ Trained./ Equipped./ Determined.” Crinkled paper collages show the subject maturing over time as swatches layer for an affirming effect that suits an intentionally told story of thoughtful composition. - Publishers Weekly
Pakistan's first professional female architect...a "great listener" and consequently a "great learner" even in childhood...An inspiring portrait of a woman whose achievements have been both literally and figuratively groundbreaking. - Kirkus Reviews
Lari’s practical approach and her innovative, ecofriendly ideas are now admired throughout the world. Written with simplicity and directness, the text offers an engaging introduction to Lari’s achievements. Hadadi creates lively, colorful scenes featuring Pakistan, its buildings, and its people. An intriguing picture-book biography of a visionary architect inspired by her homeland’s resources and traditions. - Booklist
Blending her love for design with her passion for history and traditional building techniques, [Yasmeen Lari] would become a leader in green building materials, combining sustainability, functionality, and beauty. When earthquakes and floods devastated Pakistani villages, Lari designed sustainable, low-cost structures that used renewable resources...and were designed to hold up to future disasters. In a straightforward text, Abbas presents key points about Lari's life, work, and beloved home country, while Hadadi's paper-collage art pops off the pages. A timeline as well as photographs of Lair and her green building projects further bring this ground-breaking architect's story to life. - Horn Book Magazine

From the Publisher

2024-09-28
The career of Pakistan’s first professional female architect gets an appreciative overview.

Pointedly characterizing her subject as a “great listener” and consequently a “great learner” even in childhood, Abbas follows Yasmeen Lari’s rise to “starchitect” status as she worked with “fickle and tough” clients on new projects in Karachi—and then switched her focus to preserving her country’s historical buildings. In the wake of the massive 2005 earthquake that struck northern Pakistan, she began studying traditional vernacular structures in towns and villages. Exchanging concrete, glass, and wood for bamboo, mud, and lime, she went on to design new ones more resistant to natural disasters and, in a grassroots initiative she’s dubbed “barefoot social architecture,” to train local residents to build them (40,000 so far). A strong, confident presence both in Hadadi’s brightly hued collage illustrations and the photo spread at the end, Lari actively scrapes and washes aging walls, works intently with plans and models, and dances her way past high-rises and mud-walled huts and through ornate arches and bamboo thickets. The book ends with a regal illustrated portrait and recent photographs of Lari leading an intent class of traditionally clad female students. “Yasmeen had tackled every challenge that came her way. She’d listened to the pleas of the planet and the woes of the villagers. Now the world listens to Yasmeen.”

An inspiring portrait of a woman whose achievements have been both literally and figuratively groundbreaking. (more about Yasmeen Lari, author’s note, glossary, timeline, selected sources)(Picture-book biography. 7-9)

Kirkus Reviews