Shigeru Ban will receive the 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Tom Pritzker, Chairman and President of The Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the prize, made the announcement on Monday.
Shigeru Ban, a Tokyo-born, 56-year-old architect with offices in Tokyo, Paris, and New York, is rare in the field of architecture. He designs elegant, innovative work for private clients, and uses the same inventive and resourceful design approach for his extensive humanitarian efforts.
For 22 years Ban has traveled 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.
“Receiving this prize is a great honor, and with it, I must be careful," said Shigeu Ban. "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."
Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2010, France; Photo by Didier Boy de la Tour
In all parts of his practice, Ban finds a wide variety of design solutions, often based around structure, materials, view, natural ventilation, and light, and a drive to make comfortable places for the people who use them.
From private residences and corporate headquarters, to museums, concert halls and other civic buildings, Ban is known for the originality, economy, and ingeniousness of his works, which do not rely on today’s common high-tech solutions.
The Swiss media company Tamedia asked Ban to create pleasant spaces for their employees. He responded by designing a seven-story headquarters with the main structural system entirely in timber. The wooden beams interlock, requiring no metal joints.
Tamedia Building, 2013, Zurich, Switzerland; Photo by Shigeru Ban Architects Europe
For the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in France, Ban designed an airy, undulating latticework of wooden strips to form the roof, which covers the complex museum program underneath and creates an open and accessible public plaza.
To construct his disaster relief shelters, Ban often employs recyclable cardboard paper tubes for columns, walls, and beams, as they are locally available, inexpensive, easy to transport, mount and dismantle, and they can be water- and fire-proofed, and recycled. He says that his Japanese upbringing helps account for his wish to waste no materials.
As a boy, Shigeru Ban observed traditional Japanese carpenters working at his parents’ house and to him their tools, the construction, and the smells of wood were magic. He would save cast aside pieces of wood and build small models with them. He wanted to become a carpenter. But at age eleven, his teacher asked the class to design a simple house and Ban’s was displayed in the school as the best. Since then, to be an architect was his dream.
Ban’s humanitarian work began in response to the 1994 conflict in Rwanda, which threw millions of people into tragic living conditions. Ban proposed paper-tube shelters to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and they hired him as a consultant.
Cardboard Cathedral, 2013, Christchurch, New Zealand; Photo by Stephen Goodenough
After the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, he again donated his time and talent. There, Ban developed the “Paper Log House,” for Vietnamese refugees in the area, with donated beer crates filled with sandbags or the foundation, he lined up the paper cardboard tubes vertically, to create the walls of the houses.
Ban also designed “Paper Church,” as a community center of paper tubes for the victims of Kobe. It was later disassembled and sent to Taiwan, and reconstructed there, in 2008.
Ban works with local victims, students, and other volunteers to get these disaster relief projects built. In 1995, he founded a non-governmental organization (NGO) called VAN: Voluntary Architects’ Network. With VAN, following earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes, and war, he has conducted this work in Japan, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, China, Haiti, Italy, New Zealand, and currently, the Philippines.
Japan Pavilion, Expo 2000 Hannover, 2000, Germany; Photo by Hiroyuki Hirai
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, The Lord Palumbo, said, “Shigeru Ban is a force of nature, which is entirely appropriate in the light of his voluntary work for the homeless and dispossessed in areas that have been devastated by natural disasters. But he also ticks the several boxes for qualification to theArchitectural Pantheon -- a profound knowledge of his subject with a particular emphasis on cutting-edge materials and technology; total curiosity and commitment; endless innovation; an infallible eye; an acute sensibility -- to name but a few.”
The citation from the Pritzker Prize jury underscores Ban’s experimental approach to common materials such as paper tubes and shipping containers, his structural innovations, and creative use of unconventional materials such as bamboo, fabric, paper, and composites of recycled paper fiber and plastics.
The jury cited Naked House (2000) in Saitama, Japan, in which Ban clad the external walls in clear corrugated plastic and sections of white acrylic stretched internally across a timber frame. The layering of translucent panels evokes the glowing light of shoji screens.
The client asked for no family member to be secluded, so the house consists of one unique large space, two-stories high, in which four personal rooms on casters can be moved about freely.
Ban is the seventh Japanese architect to become a Pritzker Laureate – the first six beingthe late Kenzo Tange in 1987, Fumihiko Maki in 1993, Tadao Ando in 1995, the team of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa in 2010, and Toyo Ito in 2013.
The award ceremony will take place on June 13, 2014, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
For more, visit: http://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/2014
Paper Refugee Shelters for Rwanda, 1999, Byumba Refugee Camp, Rwanda; Photo by Shigeru Ban Architects
Cardboard Cathedral, 2013, Christchurch, New Zealand; Photo by Stephen Goodenough
Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2010, France; Photo by Didier Boy de la Tour
Curtain Wall House, 1995, Tokyo, Japan; Photo by Hiroyuki Hirai
House of Double-Roof, 1993, Yamanashi, Japan; Photo by Hiroyuki Hirai
Paper Concert Hall, 2011, L’Aquila, Italy; Photo by Didier Boy de la Tour
Paper Concert Hall, 2011, L’Aquila, Italy; Photo by Didier Boy de la Tour
Metal Shutter House, 2010, New York; Photo by Michael Moran
Naked House, 2000, Saitama, Japan; Photo by Hiroyuki Hirai
Nicolas G. Hayek Center, 2007, Tokyo, Japan; Photo by Hiroyuki Hirai
Haesley Nine Bridges Golf Club House, 2010, Korea; Photo by Hiroyuki Hirai
Container Temporary Housing, 2011, Onagawa, Miyagi, Japan; Photo by Hiroyuki Hirai
Related Stories
Architects | Mar 9, 2023
HLW achieves Just 2.0 label for equity and social justice
Global architecture, design, and planning firm HLW has achieved The International Living Future Institute’s (ILFI) Just 2.0 Label. The label was developed for organizations to evaluate themselves through a social justice and equity lens.
Architects | Mar 9, 2023
A. Eugene (Gene) Kohn, Co-Founder of Kohn Pedersen Fox, dies at 92
A. Eugene (Gene) Kohn, FAIA RIBA JIA, Co-founder of international architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox, died today of cancer. He was 92.
Affordable Housing | Mar 8, 2023
7 affordable housing developments built near historic districts, community ties
While some new multifamily developments strive for modernity, others choose to retain historic aesthetics.
Architects | Mar 8, 2023
Is Zoom zapping your zip? Here are two strategies to help creative teams do their best work
Collaborating virtually requires a person to filter out the periphery of their field of vision and focus on the glow of the screen. Zoom fatigue is a well-documented result of our over-reliance on one method of communication to work. We need time for focus work but working in isolation limits creative outcomes and innovations that come from in-person collaboration, write GBBN's Eric Puryear, AIA, and Mandy Woltjer.
Building Team | Mar 8, 2023
Call for Speakers: BD+C’s 2023 Women in Residential + Commercial Construction Conference
The 2023 Women in Residential + Commercial Construction conference event will take place October 25-27 in Nashville, Tenn., and will bring together more than 300 women leaders from all facets of the $1.4 trillion U.S. residential and commercial constructing sector.
Reconstruction & Renovation | Mar 8, 2023
Hoffmann Architects + Engineers receives Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award from New York Landmarks Conservancy
Hoffmann Architects + Engineers, a design firm specializing in the rehabilitation of building exteriors, announces that the historic facade rehabilitation and window replacement at the 69th Regiment Armory has been selected for the Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award, the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s prestigious recognition for outstanding preservation efforts.
Architects | Mar 7, 2023
David Chipperfield named 2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate
Widely regarded as architecture's highest honor, the 2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize has been awarded to UK-based architect David Chipperfield. In honoring Chipperfield with the award, the Pritzker Prize jury cited the architect's "commitment to an architecture of understated but transformative civic presence and the definition—even through private commissions—of the public realm."
Multifamily Housing | Mar 7, 2023
Multifamily housing development in Chicago takes design inspiration from patchwork and quilting
HUB 32, a 65-unit multifamily housing development, will provide affordable housing and community amenities in Chicago’s Garfield Park neighborhood. Brooks + Scarpa’s recently unveiled design takes inspiration from the American tradition of patchwork and quilting.
Industrial Facilities | Mar 6, 2023
The largest planned logistics and business park in North America gets under way in Southern California
The $25 billion World Logistics Center will boost the supply chain capabilities of Southern California and will serve as a distribution center for destinations across the continent.
Healthcare Facilities | Mar 6, 2023
NBBJ kicks off new design podcast with discussion on behavioral health facilities
During the second week of November, the architecture firm NBBJ launched a podcast series called Uplift, that focuses on the transformative power of design. Its first 30-minute episode homed in on designing for behavioral healthcare facilities, a hot topic given the increasing number of new construction and renovation projects in this subsector.