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‘I don’t like waste,” says Shigeru Ban. It’s a simple statement – yet it encapsulates everything about the Japanese architect’s work. 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, and between what constitutes a temporary building and permanent one.
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. “Ukraine has one of the biggest laminated timber factories in eastern Europe,” he says. “They used to export it to Canada and the US but now they can’t. So they’re looking for an opportunity to deploy it within Ukraine.”
For Ban, architecture is a set of flexible systems rather than fixed structures. It should be mobile and responsive. He knows buildings are exposed not only to human vicissitudes but also the cataclysmic impact of geology and weather. Japan is subject to natural disasters that can reshape cities in seconds. Its Meteorological Agency records earthquake activity: mostly low-level rumbles, but as ubiquitous as a spot of rain in the UK. And although its modern buildings are required to conform to the world’s most rigorous standards of seismic design, larger earthquakes can still be catastrophic.
In the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 5,000 people, Ban designed the Paper Dome, an ostensibly temporary structure to replace the city’s destroyed Takatori Catholic Church. Constructed in five weeks by volunteers working with donated materials, and featuring recycled cardboard tubes as columns, its elliptical shape was based on Bernini’s baroque church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale in Rome. Over time it became a symbol of the city’s reconstruction, evolving into a community centre that hosted weddings, concerts, meetings and film shows. After 10 years, it was dismantled and shipped to the village of Taomi in Taiwan, which itself had endured an earthquake in 1999. “It’s still there,” says Ban.
The idea that you might construct a building out of cardboard tubes invariably precipitates Proustian remembrances of Blue Peters past, where presenters wrestled with the insides of toilet rolls to contrive all manner of creations, from advent calendars to Thunderbirds’ Tracy Island. Yet where others have a signature style, Ban has a signature material. The term “paper architect” is often disparagingly applied to architects given to theorising and proposing fanciful schemes but never actually building anything. In Ban’s case, it literally means he builds with paper.
“I started developing structures out of recycled paper in 1985, long before people started talking about environmental issues,” says Ban. Traditional Japanese buildings employ sliding shoji screens, made from translucent rice paper stretched across timber frames. And Japan has a heritage of exquisite paper-making. But it’s quite a leap from that to something robust enough to hold up a roof.
Ban started looking at the cardboard tubes that are a staple of the textile industry as cores for bolts of fabric. Rather like the insides of toilet rolls, you never see the tubes until the fabric has been exhausted, and then they are quickly discarded. “They were stronger than I expected so I started testing them more seriously,” he says. “I knew that the strength of a building has little to do with the strength of its materials. Concrete buildings can easily be destroyed by an earthquake while many centuries-old timber buildings survive.”
Ban collaborated with renowned Japanese structural engineer Gengo Matsui, an expert in traditional materials such as bamboo, and their experimentation with cardboard tubes fed into the development of a new type of building system – one that was eventually approved by the Japanese Ministry of Construction. “Essentially,” says Ban, “I developed a new way of using an existing yet disregarded material.”
As well as the Paper Dome, Ban devised simple, modular houses for Kobe’s Vietnamese community displaced by the 1995 earthquake. Walls fabricated from cardboard tubes were supported on foundations made of sandbag-filled beer crates, enclosed by a light roof of tent sheeting.
He also designed lightweight partitioning made of cardboard tubes and fabric screens, for use in large halls where displaced citizens might take refuge. “People had to sleep on the floor without any privacy,” says Ban. “I believe privacy is the most basic human right, but the government didn’t care.” Now his partitioning system is officially employed all over Japan in evacuation or disaster relief scenarios. It was even used after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine when refugees started fleeing into neighbouring countries.
The experience led Ban to establish the Voluntary Architects’ Network, an NGO that develops temporary housing and other buildings for victims of natural disasters and conflicts, from Pakistan to Altadena. Employing low-cost, recyclable local materials and local labour, it aims to bridge the gap between immediate disaster relief and the construction of more permanent structures. Sometimes Ban is directly commissioned, other times he just goes where he thinks he is needed.
Larger-scale buildings have included a temporary concert hall for L’Aquila in central Italy, to support the post-earthquake reconstruction of a city famous for its classical music scene. The project was jointly announced by the Italian and Japanese governments at the 2009 G8 summit, relocated to L’Aquila, where a bemused Silvio Berlusconi brandished a section of one of Ban’s cardboard tubes.
You could almost say that cardboard has an affinity with the divine. The now famous Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, was constructed in the wake of the 2011 earthquake, which badly damaged the city’s 19th-century cathedral designed by English gothic revivalist George Gilbert Scott. “I got an email from the Christchurch authorities,” Ban recalls. “They said, ‘You must be the architect who can design a temporary church free of charge.’” An array of cardboard tubes 60cm in diameter, reinforced with laminated timber, make up the cathedral’s soaring A-frame. Above the altar, there’s even a tubular cardboard cross.
It’s not all hair-shirt pragmatism, though. Ban is equally at home in Ginza, Tokyo’s insanely glamorous shopping district, contriving luxury boutiques for fashion houses – or in Speyside in the Scottish Highlands, the holy land of whisky, where he is currently working on a distillery with an elaborately arboreal structure that would not look out of place in The Lord of the Rings. He has also designed an art museum with a distinctive basket-weave facade in the Colorado ski resort of Aspen, and an outpost of Paris’s Pompidou Centre in the eastern French city of Metz, topped by a meringue peaked roof that seems to have more in common with the extravagances of Frank Gehry.
But Ban’s outlook is not that of a typical starchitect. “Architects work mainly for people with wealth and power,” he says. “And because wealth and power are invisible, we’re hired to create monuments to them. I want to use my experience not only for the privileged, but also for the person who has seen their home destroyed.”
Ban is currently working on the reconstruction of houses on Japan’s Noto Peninsula, which were destroyed by an earthquake on New Year’s Day 2024 that killed more than 700 people. It will incorporate timber recycled from a vast ring-shaped installation designed for last year’s Osaka Expo by fellow Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. The original official plan was to dismantle and burn what was billed as the world’s largest timber structure. “But I thought that was such a waste,” says Ban. “So I proposed some of the timber be used in post-earthquake reconstruction. We’re also salvaging roof tiles and other material from ruined houses.” As ever, waste not, want not.
