BIOGRAPHY
Shigeru Ban (Tokyo, Japan, 5th August 1957) spent his childhood and adolescence in his native country convinced that carpentry would be his trade. The task of making 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 American architect and theorist John Hejduk. From that moment onwards, his goal was to move to the United States to train as a draughtsman-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 graduated in 1984, after combining his university studies with working for a year (1982-1983) in Arata Isozaki’s studio. In 1985, he established his own firm in Tokyo, which currently also has offices in New York and Paris. His work as an architect is complemented by that of teaching at universities such as Tokyo, Harvard and Cornell (the latter two in the USA).
Considered the foremost activist of architecture by the specialized press, Shigeru Ban has achieved international prestige for being able to provide shelters and temporary housing as a rapid, effective response to extreme and devastating situations caused mostly by natural disasters. This response takes the form of high-quality designs, conceived on the basis of unconventional and reusable materials, and of constructions in which privacy and aesthetics are important factors, because, in Ban’s opinion, they contribute to improving the psychological wellbeing of their occupants.
A pioneer in the nineteen eighties of environmental awareness and sustainability, he was also concerned with expanding the role of the architect, cooperating with governments, philanthropists, public organizations and communities affected by some type of disaster. In 1995, he was appointed advisor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and established the Voluntary Architect’s Network (VAN), an NGO whose mission is to transform the concept of temporary housing for emergency situations.
Some humanitarian projects by Shigeru Ban
Today, plastic, wood, fabric, paper and, above all, cardboard constitute his allies when it comes to designing his emergency architectures, in which the priority is maximum respect for the future inhabitants of these spaces and their dignity. Using cardboard, Ban designs cylinders that, after receiving a polyurethane treatment, become a solid base for erecting structures at a minimum cost. The design for an Alvar Aalto exhibition at MoMA (New York) in 1986 allowed him to experiment with those paper tubes. He subsequently used them in prototypes of temporary housing to accommodate refugees in Rwanda, after the 1994 genocide, and in Kobe (Japan), following the 1995 earthquake. This system has also been used for the construction of private spaces for Ukrainian refugees on the border with Poland during the crisis resulting from the Russian invasion. He is currently studying the possibility of replacing steel structures with the lightness and resistance of carbon fibre, which would facilitate transport, storage and assembly.
TED Talk: "Emergency shelters made from paper"
Some of his architectural works
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Holder of the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2014) and honorary degrees 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), the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Architecture Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2005), and the AIJ Prize (2009), granted by the Japanese Institute of Architecture, among other distinctions.
MINUTES OF THE JURY
At its meeting in Oviedo, the Jury for the 2022 Princess of Asturias Award for Concord, composed of Fernando de Almansa Moreno-Barreda, Viscount of Castillo de Almansa, Ernesto Antolin Arribas, José Antonio Caicoya Cores, Manuel Contreras Caro, Sol Daurella Comadrán, Ignacio Eyriès García de Vinuesa, Isidro Fainé Casas, José Antonio Fernández Rivero, Luis Fernández-Vega Sanz, Ana González Rodríguez, Alicia Koplowitz Romero de Juséu, Laureano Lourido Artime, Marcelino Marcos Líndez, Adolfo Menéndez Menéndez, Enrique Moreno González, Carlos Navalpotro Fuster, María del Pino Calvo-Sotelo, Gregorio Rabanal Martínez, Helena Revoredo de Gut, Matías Rodríguez Inciarte, Juan Sánchez-Calero Guilarte, Gonzalo Sánchez Martínez, Antonio Suárez Gutiérrez, Gonzalo Urquijo Fernández de Araoz, Manuel Villa-Cellino Torre, Maarten Wetselaar, Ignacio Ybarra Aznar, presided over by Adrián Barbón Rodríguez, and with Pedro de Silva Cienfuegos-Jovellanos acting as secretary, has decided to grant the 2022 Princess of Asturias Award for Concord to Japanese architect Shigeru Ban for his outstanding contribution and solidarity in providing shelter which offers decent conditions to people in precarious situations as a result of social or natural emergencies, or situations of conflict. At all times guided by humanitarian values and with the contribution of volunteers, his work stands as an example of sustainable architecture via the use of recycled materials which has earned him widespread international recognition.
Oviedo, 23rd June 2022
Credits
© Fundación Princesa de Asturias
Translation: Paul Barnes
Images:
- © Nicolas Grosmond (1)
- © Forgemind ArchiMedia tiene licencia CC BY 2.0 (2, 5, 17 - 20)
- © Serhii Kostianyi (3, 4)
- © Maciej Bujko (12-14)
- © Voluntary Architects' Network (16)
- © World Economic Forum is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 (17)