With the December press release announcing a series of modular tents meant to be utilized as schools, clinics, and emergency shelters for displaced communities, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) included a series of photos. In one, smiling, happy children are sitting at their desks underneath sloping, windsail-like arches, the distinctly modern combination of aluminum frame and taut, white “tent” fabric.

When I visited one of the ZHA-designed schools in Pakistan in March, it looked like the picture come to life. Thirty-two students, mainly internally displaced people (IDPs) who had been uprooted by floods and earthquakes, were lined up in their seats, the heat and sun of the outside diminished by the white walls.

Nestled in a craggy hillside on the outskirts of Islamabad, the school isn’t where you might expect it to be. It’s hidden away inside a brand-new private housing development, one of many in Pakistan, where faulty state infrastructure and chaotic urban centers are driving a growing middle class into private “societies” that function as their own cities.

How the school ended up in such a place is telling: Zaha Hadid Architects originally designed it in collaboration with an NGO called Education Above All, a foundation created by Qatar’s former first lady, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, for a Syrian refugee camp in Turkey. Education Above All aimed to bring a pilot of the tent school to Pakistan through another NGO called Alight, which identified a need for a school in the area. A private housing society obliged and donated some land. And, thus, an award-winning architecture firm’s structure found its home, not in a refugee or an IDP camp, but at a multimillion-dollar construction site.

Twenty-seven more of the tents piloted in Pakistan and Turkey have been promised by Qatar’s World Cup committee to the International Organization for Migration and the Qatar Red Crescent in an effort by the Qataris to increase their charitable footprint around the world. Though the location of this one is unusual, its students, all of whom were pinpointed by aid workers as dropouts in need of stable schooling, don’t mind it one bit.

I asked them what they thought of the building. “It looks like a cloud,” said a13-year-old boy named Nauman. “I think it looks like a plane,” another student named Erum told me. I asked the class, whose members ranged in age from 9 to 15 (the school groups them by skill level instead of age), if they like the school. In unison, they responded, “Yessss.”

“We treat the structure like our baby,” the school’s manager, Amna Anum Subhani, told me. I didn’t grasp what she meant until I saw workers carefully wiping down the sides of the tent. Amid the arid landscape and open construction that surrounds the school, the all-white fabric quickly collects dust. One of the workers told me they wash it down every 10 or so days with soap to keep it white and clean.

Inside the school, where the students were celebrating International Women’s Day, I noticed some of the posters and colorful signs—hallmarks of any classroom—sliding off the walls. Subhani clocked me looking: “Yeah, we’ve tried a few different types of tapes,” she laughed. “Nothing works.” She said she has thought about using glue, but she is so afraid of damaging the building that she and her colleagues resorted to using signboards that they roll into the classroom.

Despite some basic design misgivings, everyone from the students to the teachers told me how much they enjoyed being inside such a futuristic structure. “There are two feeder schools that bring students into this one, and everyone is really competitive and excited to come to this campus because of the Zaha Hadid building,” said Subhani. “They feel proud of the school.”

Architect Yasmeen Lari’s Makli ZeroCarbon Cultural Centre (seen up top) was built in Pakistan in 2017. It is made of bamboo, a highly sustainable material found locally. “I believe in zero carbon. I don’t believe in high-tech solutions. I think the world needs to recognize that, and architects ought to do that,” Lari says." layout="" credit="Photos Courtesy Archive Yasmeen Lari" photoUserId=""/>

Zaha Hadid Architects is hardly the first high-profile firm to donate designs and prefabricated shelters made for emergency purposes. Dozens of architects, notably the Pritzker Prize–winning Shigeru Ban, have made designing for refugees and displaced people a mainstream practice, celebrated with awards and press coverage. But while these designs bring attention to the cause of housing for refugees and encourage firms to see these populations as deserving of architectural creativity, they can serve as prompts for an imagined refugee more than addressing the real needs of the world’s growing number of displaced people. The practice is predicated on the idea that refugees possess neither the design capability nor the materials to rebuild their lives, an outdated approach to charity that many argue is unsustainable in the face of increasingly frequent disasters.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in various refugee camps and slums. As an international reporter and documentary producer, I’d go to these places first in the wake of any disaster, be it natural or manmade, where people coalesce for a few months and other times (many times) for several years. In the years since I first began reporting on refugees and displaced people, their numbers have grown at a shocking rate. The latest UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) figures count a whopping 89.3 million people worldwide forcibly displaced from their homes in 2021, up from 38.54 million in 2011. The majority of them aren’t technically refugees but IDPs, affected by conflict, climate change, and other factors.

As their numbers grow, the perceptions of what these 89 million people need haven’t changed much in the popular view. Many still believe refugees seek only temporary shelter, despite the overwhelming evidence that displaced people rarely return to their original homes. As such, the buildings that are often designed to house them are temporary too, enough to keep them safe from the elements for a short while and afford some privacy, but not much else.

Yet a growing body of architects and design firms continue to put out proposals, year after year, of ways to reimagine the temporary refugee abode. In the briefs covering some of the many architectural plans intended to be used for such housing, two words appear frequently: “can” and “could.” Could a mud-spraying drone be used to build domes in disaster zones? Can a structure made of futuristic concrete sheets be rolled and set into permanent form, building skills not required? Could a woven structural tent house refugees in a desert? In a sector desperately in need of resources, many of these designs could have a lasting impact, but it’s rare to see them make it beyond a slick proposal, let alone implemented at scale.

Architects like Yasmeen Lari, who has dedicated the last 20 years of her career to emergency and low-cost housing, believe the idea behind these proposals is flawed. She’s referred to it as “the international colonial charity model” in interviews, predicated on importing design and charity following events like the monsoon floods that affected some 33 million Pakistanis last year. “Why do we think that we have to give them everything?” she asks me. “They have their own capabilities. It’s just a matter of providing them with training and capacity.” Lari is critical of prefab or rehabilitation efforts that carry high carbon footprints: concrete, burnt brick, imported goods that contribute to the increasing number of climate change disasters these charitable donations are meant to ameliorate.

She is no stranger to these materials: The first half of her career featured them, utilized in private houses and hotels created in the South Asian Modernist style defined by Lari and her peers, like Balkrishna Doshi and Bashirul Haq. But being based in Pakistan meant Lari had a front seat to frequent disasters and conflicts: It’s what drove her to begin designing low-cost structures for poor and displaced people after officially retiring. “I’ve had the luxury of giving up my practice and architecture, and I’ve been able to devote a lot of my time among the poor,” she says. “And I think that’s what’s shaping everything I do.”

Now, Lari’s practice is defined by indigenous materials—lime, bamboo, mud—and “cobuilding, codesigning, cocreativity” with displaced people. “The poor are my clients today,” she says, “I learn so much from their traditional heritage.” Lari refers to one of tens of thousands of housing units she’s helped develop across Pakistan after disasters like the 2005 earthquake, which affected some 3.5 million people, and, most recently, the 2022 floods.

Lari has created prefabricated units as well, which are constructed with panel sheets of locally sourced bamboo, but the flexibility of the design allows recipients to make bespoke homes. “It allows the possibility of the household and the family to finish it how they want,” she explains. “So it’s not just about building something. How do you empower communities and get them to start being partners in this, not just victims?”

The result of this approach has been breathtaking in its scale. Through Lari’s organization, the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, more than 50,000 zero-carbon shelters have been built. They’ve proved to be uniquely resilient: Her homes withstood floods in 2012 and 2013 and earthquakes in 2013 and 2015. Even now, as Lari continues to work in the flood-stricken communities in southern Pakistan, she’s devising ways for villages to protect themselves from recurring floods with moats and fences made of bamboo. The techniques are spreading: Lari tells me her artisans have been teaching others how to build their homes the same way.

“How do you empower communities and get them to start being partners in this, not just victims?”
—Yasmeen Lari, architect

But while her structures are quite literally dirt cheap, often costing less than $200 per shelter, they possess their own beauty and charm. Although the homes blend seamlessly with the local, vernacular buildings, Lari’s fingerprint and ethos appear allover them, nods to the organic Brutalism of her buildings from the ’70s and the purposeful approaches to space and light. “It’s not like I’m overlooking their design,” Lari tells me. “That’s the biggest strength I have: to design in a manner that is good for everybody and will look good also.” Lari’s structures provide the canvas for the homeowners, the displaced and poor she designs for, to make the shelters their own: painted folk art on the walls, lacelike mud figures along doors and windows.

Despite Lari’s outsize impact in a country frequently in need of emergency shelters, her ethos is considered radical in an NGO sector defined by cookie-cutter approaches to the world’s growing refugee crisis.

The Zaha Hadid school near Islamabad, promoted as a “robust, cost-effective, and lightweight modular architectural system,” took upward of four months to import and install; for two of those months, the materials were stuck in customs. Every aspect of the structure, down to the screws, was shipped internationally to Pakistan. One of the school’s caretakers described the importation and construction process to me in detail, including the search for the perfect plexiglass panels for its non-fabric walls. Ultimately, he said, the school couldn’t find the correct kind locally and imported those as well. When the fabric rips, or even if a screw must be tightened, the local crew must use the custom materials left behind by the people who built the structure. Despite Pakistan’s many architecture and engineering schools’ putting out thousands of industry-standard engineers yearly, the NGO consortium that made the tent school in Pakistan brought in multiple Turkish workers to build the structure, a feat taking multiple weeks, while they were put up in hotels in nearby Islamabad. Education Above All, one of the NGOs behind the project, says the tents cost around 207 euros per square meter when produced at mass scale, though that accounts only for manufacturing, not transportation or installation. It’s unclear how much the pilot project in Pakistan cost to produce and erect. In a statement to Dwell, Zaha Hadid Architects says the tents are cost-effective. “The cost of each structure is comparable to permanent structures built for displaced communities, making it an affordable solution for these communities in need.”

The cost and time that went into the ZHA school’s construction explain why the staff treats it with kid gloves. For a group of underprivileged students in one corner of Pakistan, it’s an incredible gift to have that level of donation and care. The more I learned about the project from administrators and teachers, the more I understood that they care for the tent structure as a state-of-the-art facility, one just as expensive and noteworthy as the private schools attended by Pakistan’s elite.

But if the intended goal was to give a group of deserving students a permanent structure, would one customized to their needs and able to support the school and staff for years to come have served them better? The tent school, while striking against the red dusty mountain blasted to make room for the concrete foundation it is built on (another hefty expense),doesn’t contain air conditioners, a must for the increasingly hot summers in Pakistan. (The school has bought its own and created holes in the tent to accommodate them.) Nor does it make room for the administrators’ building, which was constructed separately to the side of the school, housing washrooms for students, which the tents lack.

The design origins of the tent outside Islamabad explain why it feels unmatched to the Pakistani students’ needs: It wasn’t designed with them in mind. Zaha Hadid Architects began making prototypes of the tent school in 2015. An early report assessed the need for a school building in a refugee camp on the Turkish border with Syria. I visited one just miles away in 2015, the same year as the initial assessment—rows of white UNHCR tents house tens of thousands of Syrians, many of whom ran from ISIS. It’s easy to see where Zaha Hadid Architects pulled its inspiration.

The firm says its team put in immense efforts on the tents, “which are designed to be weather-proof, multiuse modular tent structures that can be easily moved and reassembled, incorporating components that can also be upcycled or recycled, making them ideal for displaced populations.” Architects presented the design to UNHCR, which recommended making it more permanent and including toilets. “We deliberately left this out as those facilities are already existing on the site,” a report from ZHA said. “Although the construction of more permanent structures might be more cost-effective, the very delicate political climate in Turkey wouldn’t allow for them to be built.” Though designed for the Turkish camp, the tents have since been installed in other settings outside Pakistan, such as the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, with plans to deploy them in Syria and Yemen, plus additional sites in Turkey.

I have no doubt the architects who created the design for the Turkish refugee camp built the best version of a school for that camp’s needs. But one is left to wonder whether a prefabricated design is worth the cost and whether it makes sense in lieu of a more intentionally permanent structure in a place like Pakistan. If the idea behind designing these tents was to prompt other major firms to consider the plight of the refugee, then perhaps the Zaha Hadid model of charitable donation can be seen as a PR win, a way to bring attention to the cause. Considering the overwhelming needs of the world’s displaced, and the frequency of climate change disasters, particularly in the developing world, it’s difficult to see how imported modular designs like this one can meet the needs of the moment.

For Lari, architects have a unique ability to rise to the occasion. “The world has changed,” she says emphatically. “If our profession wants to remain valuable to the world, many of us will have to change.”

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