Architecture for disaster relief: first Asian woman to win Norman Foster scholarship talks about her goals

Siti Nurafaf Ismail will use her award to shadow Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and Pakistan’s Yasmeen Lari on disaster relief projects

Foster praised University of Malaya 21-year-old’s winning submission for its ‘clear focus and objectives’; Afaf hopes to work in disaster management

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Siti Nurafaf Ismail, a 21-year-old Malaysian architecture student, has won the RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship, and will travel to cities affected by natural disaster to shadow two architect idols. Photo: Koray Koymen

Published: 12:45pm, 20 Jun 2019Updated: 12:53pm, 20 Jun 2019

Malaysian national Siti Nurafaf Ismail has been named the first Asian woman to win the RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship.

The £7,000 (US$8,780) scholarship, now in its 13th year, supports a student of architecture with a period of international research on a topic related to the sustainable survival of cities and towns. As 2019’s winner, 21-year-old Siti Nurafaf (better known as Afaf), an architecture student at University of Malaya, will travel to cities affected by natural disaster to “shadow” her architect idols working in that field, according to Foster + Partners.

A grant awarded by the Malaysian Institute of Architects (the 2018 PAM Travel Scholarship Award) funded the first part of Afaf’s research, enabling her to travel to Lombok, Indonesia, in January this year, following catastrophic earthquakes last August. Her mission, to study the community’s rebuilding process first-hand and examine how an architect fits into that experience, inspired her RIBA scholarship application.

The win will enable Afaf to spend 60 days each in Hokkaido, Japan, and Karachi, Pakistan, (from August and November this year respectively) with NGOs working to rebuild communities devastated by earthquakes and flooding.

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Siti Nurafaf Ismail will use her Norman Foster scholarship to shadow him on a disaster relief project. Photo: Patrick Kovarik/AFP

Whereas in Lombok, she “shadowed” the local community, in Hokkaido Afaf plans to follow Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, and in Karachi architect Yasmeen Lari, observing and documenting their work. Afaf, who hopes to specialise in disaster management after graduation, would like to follow in their footsteps.

Pritzker Prize-winning Ban, who founded the non-profit Voluntary Architects’ Network (VAN), developed a system to accommodate homeless earthquake survivors using recycled paper tubes, cardboard panels and fabric. The system provides a degree of privacy for people in refuge centres, and the materials can be recycled again once they are no longer required.