GALLERY
Ban has used paper tubes to create an arch at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, his weekend home and houses for victims of natural disasters

Japanese architect pursues vision through paper tubes

From Elsa Klensch
CNN Style Correspondent

July 7, 2000
Web posted at: 4:41 p.m. EDT (2041 GMT)

TOKYO (CNN) -- Shigeru Ban is an architect of radical vision, but also a man with a determination to see that vision realized.

The Tokyo-based designer is known for the homes, furniture and sculptures he makes from paper tubes, which are inexpensive, easily recycled and can be made fireproof and waterproof. He calls the material an improved form of wood.

Ban's work is varied and widespread, including sturdy houses he designed for the homeless after earthquakes in Kobe, Japan, in 1995 and Turkey in 1999.

For his first U.S. project, he designed a soaring lattice arch that was installed this year at New York's Museum of Modern Art, covering roughly a third of the sculpture garden.

Ban -- who won the Japan Institute of Architecture's "Best Young Architect of the Year" award in 1997 -- said the museum asked him to build an experimental house, but he let his imagination roam.

"Instead of building a single object in the courtyard, I decided to cover the whole courtyard as part of the history of the development of the museum," he said. "Because the museum is made by the different type of architecture designed by different architects, it's like a garage of the different styles. So I thought, I can attach a new element into [the] existing building as part of the garage."

Ban's S-shaped weekend home outside Tokyo is built of recyclable paper tubes

Ban also built a vast, paper-tube Japanese pavilion for Expo 2000, which opened in Hanover, Germany, in June. The theme of the Expo is sustainable development, and the Japanese government chose Ban because his paper tubes can be recycled.

"Japanese government wanted to build a pavilion that met with environmental issues," he said. "My concept is making the pavilion which can be recycled or reused after demolishing the building."

Ban began studying paper-tube technology in 1986, and used the tubes to build his own weekend residence near Tokyo, one that he said was not inspired by traditional Japanese homes.

Designing it in a big S-shaped circle, he retained the flow between inside and out with clear walls and tent-like curtains, which can be drawn for privacy in summer and shut in winter for warmth and insulation.

Ban said he tries to link his interiors with the world outside.

"I always like to connect inside and outside space and make a kind of intermediate space in between," he said. "And actually, people might think that is my influence from Japan."

He's also high on the future of paper tubing.

"If you take a look at the history of architecture," he said, "when new material or new structure system invented, new architecture comes out."

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Expo 2000
Museum of Modern Art
Japan Institute of Architects
Paper Architecture

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