"He takes materials others might overlook or discard from cardboard tubes to beer crates, styrofoam to shipping containers and subjects them to a kind of alchemy, refining rough edges and transforming fragility into sturdiness. 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's buildings blur the lines between eastern and western design traditions, between the luxurious and the ordinary."
"The strength of a building has little to do with the strength of its materials But then Ban considers all buildings to be inherently temporary. In a big city like Los Angeles or Tokyo, he says, large buildings can just disappear, especially in the commercial sector 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."
"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's 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."
Shigeru Ban repurposes discarded materials such as cardboard tubes, beer crates, styrofoam and shipping containers into durable, poetic buildings. He refines fragile materials into sturdy structures that serve boutiques, refugee housing and other uses, blurring East–West and luxury–ordinary boundaries and questioning temporary versus permanent status. Ban treats all buildings as inherently temporary, yet believes cherished lightweight structures can endure. He focuses on humanitarian architecture and disaster relief, including cardboard-tube emergency housing after Kobe and a new hospital in Lviv using locally available cross-laminated timber to deploy regional industry and aid communities affected by conflict.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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