Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/315051
CULTURED 145 The greatest creators don't just blaze a trail some- where; they concoct an entirely new destination, leading us to a place we didn't know we needed to go. Certainly the architect Shigeru Ban is one of our era's prime examples of this kind of visionary. The 56-year-old Ban, born in Japan and educated in the United States, has been rethinking and un-thinking stale conventional architectural ide as for 20 years—most radically, making humanitarian buildings quickly out of paper tubes for people affected by natural disasters. Finally the rest of the world is catching up: He's the 2014 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, his profession's version of the Nobel Prize. "It's a bigger deal than I thought," says Ban with a light chuckle, speaking to Cultured exclusively from his Tokyo office (he co mmutes each week between his Tokyo and Paris offices). "There are so many interviews and project proposals." Ban is in his element as a problem-solver. He designs by himself, using computers more sparingly than other architects, and he severely limits the number of clients he takes on. "I be- lieve that in the old times, we used to make far better architec- ture, before the computer was even created," he says. Ban is best known for devoting an enormous amount of his time to designing and building disaster-relief housing (and other structures) all over the world, most recently in the Philippines and China. He doesn't get paid for this, of course, nor does he utilize the people who work for him—he enlists unpaid student help from his teaching gig in Kyoto. "Normally architects are working for people who have money and power," says Ban, never one to mince words. "Be- cause power and money are invisible, they create architecture to show off." It's a bracing statement, evidence that Ban does not mind biting the hand that feeds. "I thought, we can use our ex- perience and knowledge for the general public and even some- one who has lost their house in a disaster." He uses local, cheap and sustainable or rec ycled building materials. And the paper tubes that are his trademark don't cre- ate buildings that look flimsy either. His Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, is truly ravishing and mighty sturdy. "Anything can be a structure," says Ban. "Water, air, grass, paper." Necessity led the way, as it often does with innovation. "I was de- signing an exhibition in 1986, and couldn't afford to use wood," he says. "There were all these paper tubes around the studio, so I decided to go with that." Currently, in the Philippines, Ban is responding to the dev- astation of last year's typhoons by using paper tubes as always, but with a local twist. "The frame is tubes, but the skin of the building is locally made and easily available woven bamboo," he says. "It's the first time I've used it. It's cheap and works with the local context." His humanitarian housing has such a pleasing, spare light- ness that it caused something of a problem: "Some of the vic- tims who live there are very happy. They don't want to leave,"