Shigeru Ban Builds Houses Out of Paper, Mixing Humble Materials With Serious Questions | A Curious Person

Does architecture always have to assert authority?

Shigeru Ban, the 60-year-old Japanese architect, usually works for two kinds of clients. One is the conventional urban developer — such as the local government behind La Seine Musicale, the concert hall that opened in Paris this April, which hoped Ban's design would turn a small island in the middle of the Seine into a cultural center.

The other kind is far larger in number and lives at disaster sites all over the world. Since 1994, when he designed shelter tents for Rwandan refugees, Ban has used "paper-tube architecture" for post-disaster reconstruction. Most recently, this July, he worked with UN-Habitat to design housing for the refugees pouring into that area.

"Architects seem to have grown used to working for one kind of client — the kind that wants us to build monuments, visual symbols of their capital and their power," Ban said on October 7 in a lecture at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. His solo exhibition, "Coexistence of Architectural Design and Disaster Relief Projects," opened at the same time. As he has insisted for years, architecture should not be designed only for the "privileged and powerful"; it should also serve people who "cannot afford [design fees] but need good design just as much."

Ban was born in Tokyo in 1957. His father worked for Toyota; his mother was a women's fashion designer. It is hard to imagine now, but as a boy his passion was rugby. He once hoped to get into Waseda University, which had a strong rugby program, but his team lost in the first round of the national tournament. Ban later went to study in the United States, enrolling at Cooper Union to study architecture. He took a year off during his studies and returned to Tokyo to intern at the studio of the architect Arata Isozaki.

In 1985, fresh out of school, Ban went back to Tokyo and opened his own firm; for the first two years most of its work was exhibitions. He first used paper tubes as a building material in 1986, for an exhibition he designed on the architect and furniture designer Alvar Aalto. Ban had hoped to use a timber structure to echo the Finnish master's style, but the budget wouldn't allow it, so he chose a renewable material instead: paper tubes.

"Testing a new building material is a complicated process with no precedent at all to follow, but the strength of paper tubes goes far beyond what people imagine."

After that exhibition, Ban began working with researchers at a paper-tube manufacturer to find wider architectural uses for the material. In 1989, when the World Design Expo was held in Nagoya, Japan, Ban designed a pavilion built from 330 paper tubes, each 55 centimeters in diameter. They watched this temporary structure age, too, and kept working to strengthen its structure and performance.

Testing let them design and produce paper tubes of different lengths and thicknesses, treated to resist fire and water and coated with film. The hollow core could hold other components, which gave the tubes good thermal and sound insulation.

"But without official approval, nobody would believe you could build a house out of paper." In 1995, Ban built himself a vacation house beside Lake Yamanaka, one of the Fuji Five Lakes, using 110 paper tubes to form an S-shaped colonnade. "In reality I had no weekends or vacations to speak of. I built that vacation house to prove that paper tubes could be used for permanent buildings."

That same year, his paper-tube structural system received permanent-building certification from Japan's Minister of Construction.

"Paper is a material that can be recycled and used over and over," Ban said in an interview with The New Yorker, in which he said he could not say what "green architecture" means. "I have no interest in 'green,' 'ecological,' or 'environmentally friendly.' I just hate wasting things."

In 2000, Ban designed the Japan Pavilion for the World Expo in Hanover, Germany. The point of using paper, he said, was not to "finish building" it but to "be able to take it apart." Every pavilion leaves behind a heap of industrial waste that is hard to digest once the expo closes. Working with the German architect Frei Otto, Ban built a huge gridded shell out of paper tubes: 440 tubes, each 12.5 centimeters in diameter, woven into a net and covered with a paper membrane. After that expo closed, all the material from the shell was shipped back to Japan and made into exercise books for elementary school students.

The first time Ban used paper tubes for post-disaster reconstruction was in Rwanda in 1994. Tribal conflict there had driven nearly two million people from their homes. Ban saw that the temporary tents the UN gave refugees were no more than a few sheets of worn plastic — crude, useless against cold and rain. Refugees were felling large numbers of trees to put up shelters of their own. To stop the destruction of the forests, the UN switched to handing out aluminum tubes and huts. But aluminum tubing sold for a good price locally, so most people quietly took the tubes apart and sold them, and went on cutting down trees to build shelters.

"For most architects, reconstruction begins with a new project launched by the government or a developer after the disaster. But why can't we do something at the moment the disaster happens?"

Ban proposed building shelters out of paper tubes to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and was hired as a consultant. He brought students to Rwanda and put up 50 tents at first, monitoring how they held up and how they resisted damp and termites. They proved highly practical, so construction went large-scale — an unprecedented success that cut the cost of the tents sharply.

But persuading clients to accept the value of paper tubes, and to build temporary transitional housing in the wreckage a disaster leaves behind, has never been easy. "Is reinforced concrete necessarily permanent? People always assume that because it costs a fortune it must be sturdier. But if it is badly designed, a reinforced-concrete building will also collapse or be torn down in short order."

In 1995, the Great Hanshin earthquake hit Japan and killed nearly 7,000 people. Ban founded an NGO, the Voluntary Architects' Network (VAN). In Kobe he found a large Vietnamese refugee population whose church had collapsed in the quake; their homes destroyed, they were living in ragged plastic tents in a park.

Ban proposed to the priest and the local government that he build a church out of paper tubes. They thought he was "crazy" — "We have just been through an earthquake and fires."

He did not give up. He began traveling to Kobe often and got to know the Vietnamese community there, still living in ragged plastic tents in a park. VAN raised money to put up new paper-tube tents for them. Kirin Brewery donated a batch of beer crates for the project — easy to assemble and easy to take apart, they were filled with sandbags and used as the foundation of the houses, with paper tubes packed tightly side by side to form the walls. "I remember we were all looking forward to the plastic beer crates arriving, hoping there would be free beer inside. They turned out to be empty, which was a bit of a disappointment."

Over that summer, Ban and his volunteers built 350 tents, and he eventually won the priest's consent to rebuild a Catholic church out of paper tubes as well, on one condition: "as long as you raise the money, you can bring your students and build it." Fifty-eight paper tubes formed the main structure, easy to dismantle, move, and rebuild; the paper church's columns and its pews were all high-density paper tubes molded in one piece, each 5 meters long, 33 centimeters in diameter, and 1.5 centimeters thick. This paper church was meant to serve as a stopgap for three years. It stood for ten.

In 2005, after an earthquake in Taiwan, Ban had the church taken apart and shipped to Nantou, Taiwan. Its exterior walls are corrugated fiberglass panels. The church still stands in Taiwan today, now a permanent building.

In 2011, an earthquake destroyed the Catholic cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, a Gothic building with 132 years of history. The local government asked Ban to build a temporary cathedral. On a concrete base he used paper tubes and shipping containers, the tubes wrapped in waterproof polyurethane and flame retardant. The exterior walls are made of 96 rigid paper tubes enclosing a triangular space 24 meters tall. All the tubes were made locally, and Ban threaded wooden beams through them for reinforcement.

"The bishop was pleased, with one objection: he felt that making even the cross out of paper tubes would seem 'cheap.' I told him that in Japanese the word for 'paper' is pronounced the same as the word for 'god.' In the end he accepted the design."

Ban finds it more natural to measure a building's life by its use — just as concrete can decay quickly, a temporary paper building can serve people for a very long time.

In 2011, a massive earthquake struck northeastern Japan and set off a tsunami. The government gathered residents into temporary shelters such as gymnasiums, where they had to wait months before being moved into temporary housing. Everyone slept on the floor, with no privacy at all. Ban built simple paper-tube frames there and hung curtains from them to make individual "rooms," putting up 1,800 partitioned units in more than 50 shelters.

The temporary housing the government provided was also extremely crude. Leaks and electrical faults were common; the units were cramped and cluttered, with nowhere to store anything. Ban eventually won the backing of Onagawa, in Miyagi Prefecture, to put up three-story housing on a baseball field. Borrowing the idea of shipping containers, he built "container homes" for 190 families, and people still live in them today.

"When we talk about earthquakes we often call them 'natural disasters,' but collapsing buildings cause more casualties," Ban said — more deaths come from "man-made disaster."

The architect Toyo Ito has been harsher about what Japan's top-down government relief planning leaves out, arguing that it aims only at the most basic safety. "What I care about more is a whole row of houses that look exactly alike, an arrangement with no humanity in it. This egalitarianism and uniformity shows up not only in temporary housing; it is also a symbol of how impoverished the essence of Japan has become today." In his book Anti-Architecture (《反建筑》), he writes about "hikikomori," the shut-ins: residents scattered into temporary housing lost the neighborhoods and neighbors they had, moved into homes with little privacy, and grew more closed off as the people next door stopped visiting one another.

Ban brought paper-tube architecture to China as well. After the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, he and volunteers from Japan and China spent 33 days building a temporary schoolhouse for the 400 students of Hualin Elementary School — three buildings with nine classrooms. A 1:1 model of it stands in the galleries of the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. The main material was again paper tubes; the roof used three layers of insulation, and a porch was added outside.

In 2011, an earthquake hit Ya'an, in Sichuan, and Ban designed a kindergarten there with a paper-tube structure.

The Sichuan architect Yin Hong worked on both of Ban's schoolhouse projects in China, and still remembers details of the construction. The wooden joints that connect the paper tubes were made to order by a mainland Chinese manufacturer, but when they reached the site for installation the volunteers found that some of them were hollow, and the schedule left no time to send them all back to the factory. Japanese structural engineers made the call: joints already installed were reinforced with injected structural adhesive, while those not yet installed went back to the factory to be reworked.

In 2014, Ban won the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The previous year's winner was Toyo Ito, the older architect he came up behind, and both citations mentioned humanitarian concern.

The profession has questioned the Pritzker's criteria before, most prominently through Patrick Schumacher, Zaha Hadid's former partner. He argued that architects' social concern had turned into a kind of "politically correct" performance. "What I would rather see is architectural innovation that helps solve and advance urban development and renewal… I worry that the criteria are shifting toward political correctness, so that people who break the rules, like Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au or Peter Eisenman, can no longer stand out."

Worries like Schumacher's peaked at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, whose theme was "Reporting from the Front." The elite of the profession looked as though they had wandered off the job, stepping outside the traditional questions of architecture to discuss poverty, disaster, pollution, congestion, segregation…

People worried: does a project blessed with "social concern" escape examination and count automatically as good design? Others pointed out that the worry is no excuse for doing nothing. The architecture critic Peter Eisenman wrote to warn against a dangerous line of argument, one that "wraps a set of uncertain values in a mood of defeatism, as if the only power people hold as citizens is a small measure of participation under grand democracy."

Ban has never answered this noisy argument head-on, saying only that "everyone has the right to express their own ideas." He still goes to the site when disaster strikes. "There is no such thing as a 'model' you can apply to different disaster zones. Every region has its own context — the natural environment, the built space, people's needs, local culture… You just have to go there."

(The lead image is the Cardboard Cathedral, photographed by Bridgit Anderson, courtesy of Shigeru Ban Architects.)