Shigeru Ban, a Japanese architect famous for building refugee houses out of cardboard, paper and beer crates, recently won Architecture’s top annual prize. Ban, 56, was cited by the Committee of the Pritzker Architecture Prize for buildings, which ‘provide shelter, community centres and spiritual places for those who have suffered tremendous loss and destruction’. “For twenty years Ban has travelled to sites of natural and man-made disasters around the world - to work with local citizens, volunteers and students, to design and construct simple, dignified, low-cost, recyclable shelters and community buildings for the disaster victims,” the Committee said. Ban’s structures have given vital shelter to thousands of survivors of natural disasters in Rwanda, Turkyt, India, China and Japan. He first came to widespread attention after creating the Paper log house used in the aftermath of the 1994 conflict in Rwanda and the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. The houses had walls made of Cardboard cubes, with an origami like roof of Paper and Plastic, and a foundation built of beer Crates. Ban was also cited by the Prize Committee for for his Cardboard Cathedral erected in Christchurch, New Zealand, after the City’s central church was damaged in the 2011 earthquake. The soaring public structure was built used Plastic sheeting and Cardboard forms. The Committee also mentioned his Curtain Wall House in Tokyo and the Nomadic Museum - which was built using shipping Containers. Ban also designs permanent structures. His 2010 design for the Centre Pompidou in Metz, France features a dramatically swooping roof made of latticed Wood, covered with Fibreglass and Teflon.
“Receiving this Prize is a great honour, and with it I must be careful,” Ban said on receiving the news. “I must continue to listen to the people I work for, in my private residential commissions and in my disaster relief work. I see this Prize as encouragement for me to keep doing what I am doing; not to change what I am doing, but to grow.“ Ban will be the seventh Japanese architect to win the Pritzker Prize, which is considered the Nobel Prize of Architecture. The Award ceremony will take place on June 13, 2014, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Pritzker Prize ceremony is held each year at a culturally or historically significant venue around the world.
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