Champion of innovative and sustainable bamboo construction for resource-poor communities
Architectural assistant, Arup Part 1: 2018 Part 2: 2022
Judges praised Sophia Malik’s commitment to heritage reuse, which led to a collaboration with Yasmeen Lari as part of her MPhil research into adaptive reuse in Pakistan using low-carbon materials.
‘She’s one of the youngest applicants and she has been able to apply her research into hybrid bamboo-earth architecture undertaken in her studies through into practice and professional collaborations,’ said Nick Hayhurst. Betty Owoo added: ‘She’s very passionate and engaged. She has taken her interest and really done something with it.’
Malik aims to challenge misconceptions surrounding ‘poor man’s’ materials, such as bamboo, earth and lime, by finding ‘beautiful and accessible’ ways to build with them. She was praised as ‘inquisitive, brave and creative,’ by her referee, Kim Qazi, a director at Arup, where she is an architectural assistant.
As well as her MPhil, she attained a first-class MEng, BEng in architectural engineering and was a co-founder of the Decolonise Architecture group. After being awarded the Bamboo U x Kenzo Parfums Scholarship, she recently collaborated on the construction of two bamboo buildings in Bali.
What existing building, place and problem would you most like to tackle?
My thesis project! It is a very real problem in Karachi – there are thousands of unused, damaged stone buildings that need reusing. I want to be the first person to adapt an existing stone building with bamboo, and I have this beautiful vision of the very rigid, rectangular colonial buildings being repaired with a contrasting bamboo structure. The old and the new, the British and the Pakistani. It’s poetic, functional and low carbon all at once.
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