‘I thought it was too early to win the Pritzker’, Shigeru Ban, this year’s laureate says with disarming modesty. He had been on the jury in the past, but that didn’t stop him thinking ‘someone was kidding’ when he received a telephone call with the news.

THE AR SHIGERU BAN ARCHIVE

• Cardboard Cathedral, Christchurch, New Zealand
• Pompodou-Metz, France
• Japan Pavilion, Hannover, Germany
• Nomadic Container Museum, Santa Monica, USA

Born in 1957, he feels he has much more to come, and his very particular model for practice seems set to ensure that he has several decades left to push the boundaries of architecture across the spectrum from disaster relief to sophisticated urban designs like the Metal Shutter House in Manhattan where we meet. Indeed, his conception of architectural practice and the range of issues it enables him to address may have contributed to his award – even at this stage in his career.

He explains how he structures his work. The large projects, with more conventional programmes, clients and budgets like the Pompidou Centre in Metz or the Metal Shutter House are run through his practice, Shigeru Ban Architects, but the disaster relief projects such as the paper cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand and a temporary, post-typhoon school in the Philippines, he does pro bono.

Metal Shutter House in New York. Photo: Michael Moran

To avoid tensions with his partners he has an NGO with one assistant, interns from his studio teaching at Kyoto University with extra students drafted in from an architecture school local to the project who are invaluable for local knowledge and no doubt get invaluable experience in their careers, however tragic the circumstances which bring them into contact with Ban.

‘Students and young architects’, he says, ‘are very interested in social work’, in contrast to his contemporaries in Japan who, graduating towards the end of the long post-Second World War boom, went headlong into the commercial world.

Conventional projects such as the Pompidou Centre in Metz are handled by Ban’s architectural practice…

…whereas disater relief projects such as the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch are managed by a separate NGO

But, points out Ban, he has never been a conventional Japanese architect: he gained a reputation abroad before he became known in Japan, and ‘apart from an internship with Isozaki’ he has never worked for a Japanese architect and has no obvious followers there. As a teenager he came across an issue of A+Uon John Hejduk, and knew that he wanted to study with him. So ‘not speaking English’ and against the advice of his businessman father who was concerned about him going to an institution called ‘Cooper Union’ rather than a university, in 1975 he headed for New York, only to be told he was not eligible.

Fortunately the then three-year-old SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) did accept him. He enjoyed being taught by Ray Kappe there but as soon as he had learnt enough he went back to Cooper Union where alongside Hejduk his teachers included Ricardo Scofidio, Todd Williams and Diana Agrest, who helped to structure his passion for inventiveness.

Ban has pioneered the structural use of paper in architecture which is strong and lightweight while being of little value to thieves and environmentally friendly

Ban on site in Port-au-Prince helping to construct disaster relief shelters after the 2010 Haiti earthquakes

In 1986, a few years after graduating, he started thinking about paper as a building material, and his use of it helps to place his own practice against Japanese tradition. In Japan, he explains, ‘paper is used only as a screen … to use a material the way it is, is very Japanese....Continue Reading

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