In this series of interviews, we meet the shortlisted candidates for the 2026 Women in Architecture and Construction Award. These women have made outstanding contributions to architecture and the built environment across the Near East and North Africa. The award features two categories: Rising Star and Woman of Outstanding Achievement.
This interview features Dr Zahra Hussain, an architect, conservator, and human geographer whose work has redefined the relationship between architecture, cultural heritage, and climate resilience in the fragile mountain landscapes of the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH).
In this interview, Dr Zahra discusses her professional background and the development of Laajverd and the Community Conservation Lab, exploring her approach to community-led conservation, translating research into policy, developing climate-resilient solutions, and the challenges and lessons that have shaped her practice.
Tell us about your background and what led you from studying Human Geography to founding Laajverd and the Community Conservation Lab.
I think I became a human geographer by being a slightly troublesome architect. I was never satisfied with looking at a building as a finished object. I became interested in the relations and processes from which built form emerges: the landscape and ecosystem, the materials and their movement, the people and skills involved in making it, and the social, cultural and political relationships through which a place is inhabited and given meaning.
I wanted to understand how these relations come together, change and sometimes endure in the spaces we build. Human Geography gave me a way to explore these relationships beyond the boundaries of architectural practice.
I founded Laajverd in 2007, while still a student, because I wanted a space to practice architecture differently: through spatial research, fieldwork, collaborations and experimentation rather than only the conventional office model.
After more than a decade working in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, I established the Community Conservation Lab there. For me, conservation is equally about context: the ecosystem a building belongs to, the materials that come from that landscape, the practices that keep it alive, and the stories and relationships attached to it.
I wanted conservation to begin with the people who hold that knowledge: the masons, carpenters, craftspeople and knowledge bearers, and to recognise their knowledge not as supplementary to “expert” knowledge, but as expertise in its own right.
What are the visions, goals or principles behind the Community Conservation Lab? How do projects like the Gholbasher Iwan or Kharmang Palace reflect them?
The Community Conservation Lab is built on the principle that heritage conservation should be collaborative, inclusive and rooted in the communities that sustain it.
We work with buildings, objects and practices as interconnected forms of community heritage, combining local knowledge with documentation, research and technical experimentation to develop practical methods for their care and long-term preservation.
In this sense, the lab not only archives traditional practices of making, but also transfers agency to the makers.
The Gholbasher Iwan and Kharmang Palace embody this approach. Both are privately owned yet deeply revered by their communities.
Rather than treating them as isolated monuments, we worked through documentation, oral histories, community training and technical conservation to strengthen the knowledge needed to care for them.
The result is not simply a conserved building, but a community better equipped to understand, maintain and transmit its heritage. The conservation intervention ends; the community’s capacity to care for its heritage remains.
Your Mountain Architecture Guidelines have gone on to shape official Building By-Laws and Conservation Codes for the Kalash Valley. Can you expand on how that translation from research into policy actually happened?
For many years, I have studied the pattern language of mountain settlements: how buildings, materials, streets, courtyards, and landscapes come together and, importantly, how these patterns persist, adapt, and mutate over time.
I developed a mapping methodology to document these relationships across multiple valleys, allowing me to move beyond individual buildings and identify the principles that give mountain settlements their character.
This became the basis for the Mountain Architecture Guidelines: policy grounded in how these places actually work, rather than imported planning models.
At the time, the mountains were experiencing rapid tourism growth, with poorly considered construction putting increasing pressure on both the environment and cultural landscapes.
The government was looking for practical responses, and we already had a body of research that could be translated into applicable guidelines. That link between long-term field research and an immediate policy need allowed the work to move from research into practice.
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced running training programmes across more than fifteen valleys in the Hindu Kush Himalaya, and how have you worked through them?
Working across more than fifteen valleys in the Hindu Kush Himalaya has meant learning to work with difficult terrain, unpredictable weather, long journeys, and places where even getting there is a challenge. But over time, I realised that reaching a valley is the easy part. The real work begins when people decide they can trust you.
I have learnt to listen before proposing anything, to return when I have said I will, and to build projects with communities rather than arrive with a ready-made solution.
In fact, I usually wait for a community to invite us before beginning substantial work in a new valley. That invitation carries weight: it means people have decided that the work matters to them and are willing to invest their time, knowledge and energy.
Many of our strongest projects have grown from those invitations and from returning, year after year, to continue the conversation.
Tell us about developing a climate-resilient mud plaster, and what led you to it.
The idea started with a complaint I kept hearing in mountain villages: “The mud doesn’t hold anymore.” Rain was getting heavier, walls were seeping, and people were increasingly turning to cement because it seemed like the obvious solution. But I kept wondering-was the problem really the mud?
So I began asking the people who had worked with it all their lives: old masons, builders and homeowners. We collected old recipes, compared soils, experimented with ratios and looked at how plaster was prepared and applied, inside and out.
Slowly, we found the material didn’t need to be abandoned; it needed to be understood and adjusted. A few changes could make a remarkable difference to its performance. The mix varies from valley to valley because the local soil is its main ingredient.
Today, communities are using the plaster to repair their homes, choosing a material they can make themselves rather than relying on cement.
What are you working on now?
Right now, much of my work focuses on helping mountain communities retain the knowledge and capacity to care for their own heritage and environments.
Through the Community Conservation Lab, we have developed a conservation training programme supported by the Commonwealth Heritage Forum.
We have completed two rounds of training; one in Baltistan and one in the Kalash Valley, linking the training directly to the conservation of a mosque and a Kalasha dwelling.
We have now taken on a larger programme in the Kalash Valley to protect its built environment, and are preparing for the next phase.
At the same time, I am developing ecosystem-based adaptive frameworks for mountain communities. After more than a decade of working in these landscapes, I feel a growing urgency about what is happening to them. Mountains are increasingly being treated as commodities, land to build on, resources to extract, and destinations to consume.
Yet these landscapes are held together by complex relationships between people, land, water, farming, materials and culture. My work increasingly focuses on surfacing those relationships and finding ways to keep them alive.
You lead conservation and training programmes across more than fifteen valleys in the Hindu Kush Himalaya, often in communities with their own traditions about who gets to make decisions about a building. What has been the hardest obstacle to move through in that room, and how did you do it?
Perhaps the hardest obstacle has not been technical at all. It has been understanding who has the authority to make decisions about heritage-and then finding a way to widen that conversation without undermining the structures that already exist within a community.
In many of the valleys where we work, decisions about a building may traditionally sit with particular family members, elders, or male community leaders. But the knowledge of how a building is made, maintained and lived in is often distributed much more widely.
Women may know the materials and domestic spaces intimately; younger people may hold skills that are disappearing; masons and carpenters carry knowledge that is rarely recognised as “heritage expertise.”
I have learnt not to enter that room assuming that I know who needs to be there. We spend time listening, building relationships and understanding the local decision-making landscape first. Then we create spaces where different kinds of knowledge can meet, through training, documentation, workshops, and practical conservation work.
The key shift is that we are not asking communities to abandon their decision-making practices. We are trying to make the conservation process large enough to include the people who hold the knowledge needed to keep that heritage alive.
For me, meaningful participation looks like this: not simply giving people a voice, but recognising the knowledge they already possess as expertise.
What’s a piece of advice you give the people who come through the ten-day field programme that you had to learn the hard way yourself, because nobody told you?
One thing I tell people coming through our ten-day field programme is: stay curious, and don’t arrive thinking you already know. I learnt this because the field always fascinated me precisely because it was unfamiliar. I found it mysterious. There was so much I did not know, and that made me inquisitive; I wanted to understand before I began to interpret or intervene.
You cannot understand a place from a desk, or arrive with a solution and expect it to fit. You have to walk through it, observe, ask questions, sit with people, listen to their stories, and understand the relationships that hold a place together. Only then can you start thinking about what might actually be useful.
I often talk to young people about niyyat, an Arabic word meaning intention, particularly the intention behind why you are doing something. In fieldwork, people recognise whether you have come with genuine curiosity and a desire to contribute, or simply to take something away.
Good niyyat does not mean that you will always get it right. It means you enter with humility, remain open to learning, and are willing to let the place and the people change your understanding.
Meet the Shortlist series is a compilation of interviews with those who have been shortlisted for our awards. Saliha Benmessaoud is on the shortlist for the Women in Architecture and Construction Award, which recognises women who have made outstanding contributions to architecture and the built environment across the Near East and North Africa.
Meet the Shortlist: Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Dr Hiba Alkhalaf, Jomana Baddad, Meisa Batayneh, Nuha Dandis, Ronak Roshan Gilvaei, Saliha Benmessaoud, Salima Naji, and Salwa and Selma Mikoü.
Tamayouz Excellence Award is sponsored by 99 Properties Development, Coventry University, Dewan Architects + Engineers, the Mohamed Makiya Foundation, Bonair Ltd, Aji Group, and Round City Magazine.