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Eight years after obtaining the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, considered the world’s highest award in the discipline, the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban (Tokio, 1957) has obtained a new recognition of great relevance, the Princess of Asturias Award for Concordin this case for his great humanitarian commitment.
The judgechaired by Adrián Barbón Rodríguez, agreed to award him the award “for his outstanding charitable contribution by providing shelter in decent conditions to people in a precarious situation derived from social and natural emergencies or conflict situations. His work, always guided by humanitarian values and with the contribution of volunteers, it offers an example of a sustainable architecture with the use of recycled materials that has deserved wide international recognition«.
He spent his childhood and adolescence in his native country with the conviction that carpentry would be his trade.
Commissioning a model of a house for his art class when he was in secondary school sparked his vocation for architecture, while an article in a specialized magazine led him to become interested in the works of the American architect and theorist John Hejduk. From that moment on, his goal was to move to the United States to train as a designer. In 1977 he enrolled at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where he studied until 1980. That same year he moved to New York to continue his training at The Cooper Union School of Architecture, where Hejduk was dean. He finished his bachelor’s degree in 1984, after combining his university classes with working for a year (1982-1983) in the study of Arata Isozaki. In 1985 he founded his own firm in Tokyo, which today also has a presence in New York and Paris. To his work as an architect is added that of teaching at universities such as Tokyo, Harvard and Cornell (the latter in the United States).
The great architecture activist
Considered the great architecture activist by the specialized press, Shigeru Ban has achieved international prestige for being able to give rapid and effective responses in the form of shelters and temporary housing to extreme and devastating situations caused mostly by natural disasters. These responses materialize in high-quality designs, conceived based on unconventional and reusable materials, and in constructions in which privacy and aesthetics are important factors because, in Ban’s opinion, they contribute to improving the psychological state of its inhabitants. .
Pioneer in the eighties of the cenvironmental awareness and sustainability, was also concerned with expanding the role of the architect, cooperating with governments, communities affected by some type of disaster, public organizations and philanthropists. In 1995 he was appointed adviser to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and founded the Voluntary Architect’s Network (VAN), an NGO to transform the concept of temporary housing for emergency situations.
Ukrainian refugees
Today, plastic, wood, fabric, paper and, above all, cardboard are his allies when it comes to designing his emergency architectures, in which the priority is the maximum respect for the future inhabitants of these spaces and for their dignity. With cardboard, Ban designs cylinders that, after receiving a polyurethane treatment, become a solid base for erecting structures at a minimum cost. The design of an exhibition Alvar Aalto for MoMA (New York) in 1986 it helped him to experiment with those paper tubes. Later, he used them in prototypes of temporary houses to accommodate refugees in Rwanda –after the 1994 genocide– or in Kobe (Japan) –after the 1995 earthquake–. This system has also been used for the construction of privacy spaces for Ukrainian refugees at the border with Poland during the crisis caused by the Russian invasion. Currently, it is studying the possibility of replacing steel structures with the lightness and resistance of carbon fiber, which would facilitate transport, storage and assembly.
The trajectory of this architect is distinguished, according to Fredy Massad, ABC Architecture critic, by a fundamental interest in research with techniques and materials driven by the motivation to “use what exists in different ways” and propose structural innovations -in which also underlies the weight of the Japanese architectural tradition−. uninterested in fashionBan considers that this search for new ways of building things allows freeing the work itself from the influence of these transitory flows, even from the label of “sustainable” and “ecological” which is usually attributed to its architecture. «This way of working came naturally to me already at the beginning, 30 years ago. I was always interested in low-cost, local, reusable materials». This has endowed him with a knowledge that has enabled him both to build museums, company headquarters, private homes, libraries, commercial premises, churches, pavilions… and to provide, from a tireless altruistic commitment, efficient and emergency solutions. in situations of humanitarian catastrophe since in 1994 it designed a model of temporary housing for Rwandan refugees.
Also noteworthy in his career are projects such as the Library of a Poet (1991), Paper Church in Kobe (1995); the Paper House, (1995), the Nine Grid Square House (1997), the Paper Dome (1998) and the Naked House (2000), where the conventions of space division and domestic routines were questioned; the Paper Theater in Amsterdam (2003); the Nomad Museum in New York (2005), his own Parisian studio created in 2006, located on the terrace of the Center Pompidou, from which he worked on the design of the museum in Metz, built with cardboard tubes.
The Japanese pavilion deserves a special mention for the Universal Exhibition in Hannover (2000), in which Ban had the opportunity to work with one of his reference figures, Free Otto, which praises him as “a true construction artist, an architect who understands that simple solutions are often the most complex to develop and who is constantly open to new ideas without losing sight of his goals.” Among his most recent works, the temporary dwellings in containers in Onagawa (Japan, 2011), the auditorium in L’Aquila (Italy, 2011) and the Cardboard Cathedral (New Zealand, 2013) stand out. In Spain built a pavilion in the garden of IE University (Instituto Empresa de Madrid) with the structure of paper tubes that characterizes many of his works.
Pritzker Prize in 2014 and honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Munich (Germany, 2009) and the New School (USA, 2011), Shigeru Ban has received the Gold Medal from the French Academy of Architecture ( 2004) and the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Architecture Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2005) and AIJ (2009), granted by the Japanese Institute of Architecture, among other recognitions.
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