\u2018I don\u2019t like waste,\u201d says Shigeru Ban. It\u2019s a simple statement \u2013 yet it encapsulates everything about the Japanese architect\u2019s work. He takes materials others might overlook or discard \u2013 from cardboard tubes to beer crates, styrofoam to shipping containers \u2013 and subjects them to a kind of alchemy, refining rough edges and transforming fragility into sturdiness.<\/p>\n
The outcome is a perpetually ingenious and curiously poetic scavenger architecture that finds beauty and purpose in the everyday. From high-end boutiques to housing for refugees, Ban\u2019s buildings blur the lines between eastern and western design traditions, between the luxurious and the ordinary, and between what constitutes a temporary building and permanent one.<\/p>\n
The strength of a building has little to do with the strength of its materials<\/p>\n
But then Ban considers all buildings to be inherently temporary. \u201cIn a big city like Los Angeles or Tokyo,\u201d he says, \u201clarge buildings can just disappear, especially in the commercial sector \u2013 torn down to make way for new ones that will make more money for developers. Whereas a building made of paper can be permanent, as long as people cherish it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recently awarded the 2026 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, and due to give a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London this week, Ban is a globetrotter on the architectural circuit. But he is still consumed by his core mission to improve people\u2019s lives, especially in areas of disaster and conflict. He is building a new hospital in Lviv, in the less war-ravaged west of Ukraine, using cross-laminated timber. \u201cUkraine has one of the biggest laminated timber factories in eastern Europe,\u201d he says. \u201cThey used to export it to Canada and the US but now they can\u2019t. So they\u2019re looking for an opportunity to deploy it within Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emergency relief \u2026 cardboard tube housing with beer-crate foundations for the displaced population of Kobe after the 1995 earthquake. Photograph: Hiroyuki Hirai<\/p>\n
For Ban, architecture is a set of flexible systems rather than fixed structures. It should be mobile and responsive. He knows buildings are exposed not only to human vicissitudes but also the cataclysmic impact of geology and weather. Japan is subject to natural disasters that can reshape cities in seconds. Its Meteorological Agency records earthquake activity: mostly low-level rumbles, but as ubiquitous as a spot of rain in the UK. And although its modern buildings are required to conform to the world\u2019s most rigorous standards of seismic design, larger earthquakes can still be catastrophic.<\/p>\n
In the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 5,000 people, Ban designed the Paper Dome, an ostensibly temporary structure to replace the city\u2019s destroyed Takatori Catholic Church. Constructed in five weeks by volunteers working with donated materials, and featuring recycled cardboard tubes as columns, its elliptical shape was based on Bernini\u2019s baroque church of Sant\u2019Andrea al Quirinale in Rome. Over time it became a symbol of the city\u2019s reconstruction, evolving into a community centre that hosted weddings, concerts, meetings and film shows. After 10 years, it was dismantled and shipped to the village of Taomi in Taiwan, which itself had endured an earthquake in 1999. \u201cIt\u2019s still there,\u201d says Ban.<\/p>\n
The idea that you might construct a building out of cardboard tubes invariably precipitates Proustian remembrances of Blue Peters past, where presenters wrestled with the insides of toilet rolls to contrive all manner of creations, from advent calendars to Thunderbirds\u2019 Tracy Island<\/a>. Yet where others have a signature style, Ban has a signature material. The term \u201cpaper architect\u201d is often disparagingly applied to architects given to theorising and proposing fanciful schemes but never actually building anything. In Ban\u2019s case, it literally means he builds with paper.<\/p>\n \u2018The government didn\u2019t care about privacy\u2019 \u2026 Shigeru Ban. Photograph: Hiroyuki Hirai<\/p>\n \u201cI started developing structures out of recycled paper in 1985, long before people started talking about environmental issues,\u201d says Ban. Traditional Japanese buildings employ sliding shoji screens, made from translucent rice paper stretched across timber frames. And Japan has a heritage of exquisite paper-making. But it\u2019s quite a leap from that to something robust enough to hold up a roof.<\/p>\n Ban started looking at the cardboard tubes that are a staple of the textile industry as cores for bolts of fabric. Rather like the insides of toilet rolls, you never see the tubes until the fabric has been exhausted, and then they are quickly discarded. \u201cThey were stronger than I expected so I started testing them more seriously,\u201d he says. \u201cI knew that the strength of a building has little to do with the strength of its materials. Concrete buildings can easily be destroyed by an earthquake while many centuries-old timber buildings survive.\u201d<\/p>\n The Christchurch authorities emailed saying: \u2018Are you the architect who can design a temporary church free of charge?\u2019<\/p>\n Ban collaborated with renowned Japanese structural engineer Gengo Matsui, an expert in traditional materials such as bamboo, and their experimentation with cardboard tubes fed into the development of a new type of building system \u2013 one that was eventually approved by the Japanese Ministry of Construction. \u201cEssentially,\u201d says Ban, \u201cI developed a new way of using an existing yet disregarded material.\u201d<\/p>\n As well as the Paper Dome, Ban devised simple, modular houses for Kobe\u2019s Vietnamese community displaced by the 1995 earthquake. Walls fabricated from cardboard tubes were supported on foundations made of sandbag-filled beer crates, enclosed by a light roof of tent sheeting.<\/p>\n He also designed lightweight partitioning made of cardboard tubes and fabric screens, for use in large halls where displaced citizens might take refuge. \u201cPeople had to sleep on the floor without any privacy,\u201d says Ban. \u201cI believe privacy is the most basic human right, but the government didn\u2019t care.\u201d Now his partitioning system is officially employed all over Japan in evacuation or disaster relief scenarios. It was even used after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine when refugees started fleeing into neighbouring countries.<\/p>\n The stuff of drams \u2026 how Ban\u2019s timber distillery in Speyside will look. Illustration: Shigeru Ban Architects<\/p>\n The experience led Ban to establish the Voluntary Architects\u2019 Network, an NGO that develops temporary housing and other buildings for victims of natural disasters and conflicts, from Pakistan to Altadena. Employing low-cost, recyclable local materials and local labour, it aims to bridge the gap between immediate disaster relief and the construction of more permanent structures. Sometimes Ban is directly commissioned, other times he just goes where he thinks he is needed.<\/p>\n Larger-scale buildings have included a temporary concert hall for L\u2019Aquila in central Italy, to support the post-earthquake reconstruction<\/a> of a city famous for its classical music scene. The project was jointly announced by the Italian and Japanese governments at the 2009 G8 summit<\/a>, relocated to L\u2019Aquila, where a bemused Silvio Berlusconi brandished a section of one of Ban\u2019s cardboard tubes.<\/p>\n You could almost say that cardboard has an affinity with the divine. The now famous Cardboard Cathedral<\/a> in Christchurch, New Zealand, was constructed in the wake of the 2011 earthquake, which badly damaged the city\u2019s 19th-century cathedral designed by English gothic revivalist George Gilbert Scott. \u201cI got an email from the Christchurch authorities,\u201d Ban recalls. \u201cThey said, \u2018You must be the architect who can design a temporary church free of charge.\u2019\u201d An array of cardboard tubes 60cm in diameter, reinforced with laminated timber, make up the cathedral\u2019s soaring A-frame. Above the altar, there\u2019s even a tubular cardboard cross.<\/p>\n Meringue peaked roof \u2026 Centre Pompidou-Metz, France. Photograph: Ullstein Bild\/Getty Images<\/p>\n It\u2019s not all hair-shirt pragmatism, though. Ban is equally at home in Ginza, Tokyo\u2019s insanely glamorous shopping district, contriving luxury boutiques for fashion houses \u2013 or in Speyside in the Scottish Highlands, the holy land of whisky, where he is currently working on a distillery with an elaborately arboreal structure that would not look out of place in The Lord of the Rings. He has also designed an art museum with a distinctive basket-weave facade in the Colorado ski resort of Aspen, and an outpost of Paris\u2019s Pompidou Centre in the eastern French city of Metz, topped by a meringue peaked roof that seems to have more in common with the extravagances of Frank Gehry.<\/p>\n But Ban\u2019s outlook is not that of a typical starchitect. \u201cArchitects work mainly for people with wealth and power,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd because wealth and power are invisible, we\u2019re hired to create monuments to them. I want to use my experience not only for the privileged, but also for the person who has seen their home destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n Ban is currently working on the reconstruction of houses on Japan\u2019s Noto Peninsula, which were destroyed by an earthquake on New Year\u2019s Day 2024 that killed more than 700 people. It will incorporate timber recycled from a vast ring-shaped installation designed for last year\u2019s Osaka Expo<\/a> by fellow Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto<\/a>. The original official plan was to dismantle and burn what was billed as the world\u2019s largest timber structure. \u201cBut I thought that was such a waste,\u201d says Ban. \u201cSo I proposed some of the timber be used in post-earthquake reconstruction. We\u2019re also salvaging roof tiles and other material from ruined houses.\u201d As ever, waste not, want not.<\/p>\n Shigeru Ban Complete Works 1985-Today<\/a> is published by Taschen. 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