Shigeru Ban

Born 1957 · Japanese · 13 buildings on the wall

Shigeru Ban (born 1957) is a Japanese architect known for building with paper, above all recycled cardboard tubes, and for quick, low-cost shelters for people who have lost their homes in disasters. He studied at Cooper Union in New York under John Hejduk, founded the Voluntary Architects' Network in 1995 to build temporary buildings after disasters and conflicts, and won the Pritzker Prize in 2014 for his use of materials and his humanitarian work.

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The Paper Dome (Paper Church), a church of paper tubes put up in 1995 after the Great Hanshin earthquake, was later rebuilt in Puli, Taiwan. For the Japan Pavilion, Expo 2000, in Hanover, he worked with Frei Otto and the engineers Buro Happold on a 72-metre gridshell of paper tubes. The Centre Pompidou-Metz (2010) is covered by a 90-metre hexagonal roof of laminated timber woven like the cane of a Chinese hat. After the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, his Cardboard Cathedral (2013) gave the city a transitional church built from more than 90 large cardboard tubes, timber and steel. Shigeru Ban's projects are studied for low-waste materials and for serving people in crisis.

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