Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The last time I visited Shigeru Ban’s office, it was on top of the Pompidou Centre. The Japanese architect had just won a competition to build a new Pompidou Centre, in Metz, but didn’t have the money to rent a studio in Paris. So he did a deal, marking out a little real estate overlooking the city’s zinc rooftops from amid the huge trusses and tubes of the original Pompidou. It looked oddly at home there, although it was made not of steel and glass but of cardboard tubes and paper, like a model of an aeroplane fuselage knocked up by talented students using wrapping paper rolls, glue and cheap timber. It was one of the most thrilling architect’s offices I have ever seen, and certainly in one of the best spots.This time when I visit, the offices are in a rather more conventionally Parisian building at the back of a courtyard. Most of the interior is still made of cardboard tubes, though, including the shelves behind Ban, which are packed with models and books, including Taschen’s huge blockbuster Shigeru Ban: Complete Works 1985-Today (almost an architectural component itself). We talk in a garret studio, the rain beating down outside.In September, Ban won the Praemium Imperiale, one of culture’s biggest prizes, sponsored by Japan’s imperial family on behalf of the Japan Art Association. Previous architecture awardees have included Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Tadao Ando. Ban is in esteemed company, then, yet he is a curious kind of success. Despite global acclaim, he remains remarkably unstarry, a little shy and impeccably modest. He carries out much of his work not in cultural quarters and upmarket urban neighbourhoods, but in the mud and misery of refugee camps and disaster zones.How, I wonder, looking at the shelves behind him, did he alight on those cardboard tubes as his wonder material? “It was initially because I hated to waste anything,” he says, almost sheepishly. “We did drawings on tracing paper and it came in huge rolls and I didn’t want to throw the cardboard tubes away. The same with the tubes for the fax paper. And then we were commissioned to do this exhibition on Alvar Aalto [the Finnish architect and designer] and we couldn’t afford to use wood. We found the cardboard tubes worked fine. One critic called me an ‘accidental environmentalist’.”I was disappointed because what we do is we serve power and money. I wanted to use my profession for the general publicFrom those beginnings as a hoarder — his word — Ban moved to ever larger structures, from expo pavilions (notably the undulating Japanese Pavilion at Hanover in 2000) to a “Cardboard Cathedral”, created for Christchurch in New Zealand in the wake of the devastating earthquake in 2011. It is one of the most remarkable, uplifting and joyful churches I have seen, one that takes an almost childlike pleasure in its chunky tubes, elemental, building-blocks form and translucent surfaces.More impressive still is the emergency housing that Ban has been designing and building in the world’s disaster zones since the mid-1990s, also using cardboard tubes. How did the humanitarian work that now occupies so much of his time begin? “I’d come back to Japan from studying in the US in 1984 and started my own practice with no experience,” he says. “After 10 years, I had a little more freedom to think about what I was doing, what architecture is, and I was disappointed because what we do is we serve power and money. I wanted to use my profession for the general public.”Ban first designed emergency housing for Rwanda in 1995, following the civil war and genocide against the Tutsi, using a series of simple paper-tube structures covered by standard UN plastic sheeting. It looked like a rigid tent. He gradually refined the designs, working in the wake of the Kobe earthquake back home in Japan in 1995 and another in north-west Turkey in 2000. “Earthquakes don’t kill people,” he tells me, as an aside, “buildings kill people when they collapse; architects are responsible for that too”. Paper, you might think, is a profoundly impermanent material, but Ban proudly points out that one of the “Paper Log Houses” he erected in Gujarat after the 2001 earthquake (made of paper tubes, bamboo, plywood and rubble) is still being used 23 years later, as a health centre.In parallel, Ban was building a name for himself as an adventurous, often eccentric architect of some of the era’s most remarkable buildings. His Curtain Wall House (Itabashi, 1995), for instance, saw him play with ephemerality, as solid walls were replaced by curtains and rooms made to theatrically open up to the elements, while the Wall-less House (Nagano, 1997) took the idea even further with disappearing sliding walls, so that the interior appears defined only by a roof. Slowly, there came higher-profile international commissions. A Nomadic Museum (2005) on Manhattan’s Pier 57 was made of shipping containers, tarpaulins and cardboard tubes, and designed to be easily reassembled in other cities around the world. The rather lumpy Pompidou-Metz (2010) coincided with radical designs in cardboard for everything from schools to bridges, luxury villas, condos and pop-up pavilions for fashion brands including Hermès. Currently on Ban’s drawing board is a tower for Tirana, Albania; a continuation of the huge Liangzhu Museum in Hangzhou, China, and a small cabin for victims of the recent floods in Pakistan. “There is also a hospital I’m designing for Lviv [Ukraine]. Their existing hospital is operating over capacity. I started working with the mayor designing emergency housing and it led to this.”When, incidentally, Ban says “I’m designing . . .”, he is not being arrogant, denigrating the others in his office. His colleagues tell me he designs every last detail of every building. And draws them, too. “Oh yes, we still do hand drawings,” he says. “Technology does not make architecture better. The computer is a tool to save time, but as architects we should be spending more time on architecture, not less.” After our meeting I chat to one of Ban’s colleagues at the Paris office. When I ask how they manage to fund the disaster relief work, which, I suggest, must be incredibly time-consuming, a slightly pained expression crosses his face. “Mr Ban is really not that interested in money,” he says, which means, I think, that maintaining the balance is difficult. The computer is a tool to save time, but as architects we should be spending more time on architecture, not lessBan’s true enthusiasms clearly reside with the displaced. But when I raised the difficulty of reconciling these parallel careers with Ban himself, he said: “We are experimenting in both. We have to always try new things, otherwise we will never learn anything. For me there is no difference between the emergency work and the other projects . . . except whether I’m being paid or not.” Forty years or so ago, a label emerged for a particular type of architect who drew with visionary flair, but whose buildings were deemed too fantastical to build, or were never conceived for the world beyond the page: “paper architects”. Ban has completely subverted the label. He draws on paper, he builds with paper and from that cheap, sustainable material he has fabricated an oeuvre that is useful and beautiful; physically present and yet still, somehow, fantastical.‘Shigeru Ban: Complete Works 1985-Today’ is published by TaschenFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
