Crazy cartoon! Genius scavenger Shigeru bans building cathedrals and earthquake shelters with paper Build

‘I “I don’t like waste,” says Shigeru Ban. It’s a simple phrase – but it sums up everything about the Japanese architect’s work. It takes materials that others might ignore or dismiss—from cardboard tubes to beer boxes, Styrofoam to shipping containers—and subjects them to a kind of chemistry, smoothing out rough edges and turning fragility into durability.

The result is an always ingenious and poetically strange scavenger architecture that finds beauty and purpose in everyday life. From high-end shops to refugee housing, 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 what constitutes a permanent building.

But then it is considered that all buildings are temporary in nature. “In a big city like Los Angeles or Tokyo, large buildings, especially in the commercial sector, could disappear – being torn down to make way for new buildings that would generate more money for developers,” he says. “Whereas a building made of paper could be permanent, as long as people cherish it.”

Recently awarded the American Institute of Architects’ 2026 Gold Medal and scheduled to lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London this week, Pan is a traveler on the architectural circuit. But it remains preoccupied with its core mission of improving people’s lives, especially in disaster and conflict zones. He is building a new hospital in Lviv, in western Ukraine less affected by the war, using cross-linked timber. “Ukraine has one of the largest plywood factories in Eastern Europe,” he says. “They used to export it to Canada and the United States, but now they can’t. So they are looking for an opportunity to spread it inside Ukraine.”

Ban sees architecture as a set of flexible systems rather than fixed structures. It must be mobile and responsive. He knows that buildings are exposed not only to human vagaries, but also to the catastrophic effects of geology and weather. Japan is plagued by natural disasters that can reshape cities in seconds. Its meteorological agency records earthquake activity: mostly low-level shaking, but as ubiquitous as a rain patch in the UK. Although its modern buildings are required to meet the world’s most stringent seismic design standards, larger earthquakes can be catastrophic.

Following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 5,000 people, Ban Ki-moon designed the Paper Dome, an ostensibly temporary structure to replace the city’s destroyed Takatori Catholic Church. Built in five weeks by volunteers working with donated materials, it features recycled cardboard tubes as columns, and its oval shape was based on the Baroque church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale in Rome. Over time, it became a symbol of the city’s reconstruction, evolving into a community center hosting weddings, concerts, meetings and film screenings. Ten years later, it was dismantled and shipped to the village of Taomei in Taiwan, which itself suffered an earthquake in 1999. “It’s still there,” Pan says.

The idea of ​​creating a building out of cardboard tubes always evokes Proust’s memories of Blue Peters’ past, where presenters wrestled with the insides of toilet rolls to come up with all sorts of creations, from advent calendars to Tracy Island in Thunderbirds. However, where others have a distinctive style, Pan has distinctive material. The term “paper architect” is often applied disparagingly to architects who theorize and propose fancy schemes but never actually build anything. In Pan’s case, it literally means he builds with paper.

“I started developing structures from recycled paper in 1985, long before people started talking about environmental issues,” Pan says. Traditional Japanese buildings use sliding Shuji Screens made of transparent rice paper stretched across wooden frames. Japan has a wonderful heritage in paper making. But it’s a big jump from that to something strong enough to hold up a roof.

Ban began to look at cardboard tubes, a staple of the textile industry, as the heart of fabric bolts. Just like the insides of toilet rolls, you never see the tubes until the fabric is 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 had nothing to do with the strength of its materials. Concrete buildings could easily be destroyed by an earthquake, while many wooden buildings dating back centuries still remained.”

Ban Ki-moon collaborated with the famous Japanese structural engineer Jinjo Matsui, an expert in traditional materials such as bamboo, and their experiments with cardboard tubes led to the development of a new type of building system – a system that was eventually approved by the Japanese Ministry of Construction. “Basically, I developed a new way of using an existing but overlooked material,” Pan says.

In addition to the paper dome, Pan created simple model homes for the Vietnamese community in Kobe displaced by the 1995 earthquake. Walls made of cardboard tubes were supported on foundations made of beer crates filled with sandbags, surrounded by a light roof of tent tarps.

He also designed lightweight partitions made of cardboard tubes and fabric barriers, for use in large halls where displaced citizens could take refuge. “People had to sleep on the floor without any privacy,” Pan says. “I believe privacy is the most basic human right, but the government didn’t care.” Now its zoning system is officially used throughout Japan in evacuation or disaster relief scenarios. It was used even after the large-scale invasion of Ukraine when refugees began fleeing to neighboring countries.

This experience led Ban to create the Volunteer Architects Network, an NGO that develops temporary housing and other buildings for victims of natural disasters and conflicts, from Pakistan to Altadena. By using low-cost, recyclable local materials and local labor, the program aims to bridge the gap between immediate disaster relief and the construction of more permanent structures. Sometimes Pan is assigned directly, other times he goes where he thinks he is needed.

The large-scale buildings included a temporary concert hall in L’Aquila in central Italy, to support post-earthquake reconstruction in a city famous for its classical music scene. The project was jointly announced by the Italian and Japanese governments at the 2009 G8 summit, and was taken to L’Aquila, where a bemused Silvio Berlusconi waved part of one of Ban Ki-moon’s cardboard tubes.

You could almost say the cardboard has a connection to the divine. The now-famous Carton Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, was constructed following the 2011 earthquake, which severely damaged the city’s 19th-century cathedral designed by English Gothic revivalist George Gilbert Scott. “I received an email from the Christchurch authorities,” Pan recalls. “They said: ‘You must be the architect who can design a temporary church for free.’” A group of 60cm diameter cardboard tubes, reinforced with wooden panels, forms the cathedral’s high A-shaped frame. Above the altar is a cardboard tubular cross.

However, it is not just pragmatism. Ban feels equally at ease in Ginza, Tokyo’s insanely charming shopping district, home to the luxury boutiques of fashion houses – or in Speyside in the Scottish Highlands, the hallowed land of whisky, where he currently works at a distillery with an elaborate tree structure that wouldn’t look out of place in the movie “The Lord of the Rings.” He has also designed an art museum with a distinctive basket-weave facade at the Aspen ski resort in Colorado, and an outpost of the Pompidou Center in Paris in the eastern French city of Metz, topped with a meringue ceiling that seems to share more opulence with Frank Gehry.

But Ban Ki-moon’s view is not that of a typical model engineer. “Architects work mainly for people with wealth and power,” he says. “And because wealth and power are invisible, we were hired to create memorials to them. I want to use my experience not just for the wealthy, but also for the person who saw their home destroyed.”

Ban is currently working to rebuild homes on Japan’s Noto Peninsula, which was destroyed by the 2024 New Year’s Day earthquake that killed more than 700 people. It will incorporate recycled timber 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 described as the largest wooden structure in the world. “But I thought it was a waste of time,” Pan says. “So I suggested using some of the wood for post-earthquake reconstruction. We also salvage roof tiles and other materials from destroyed houses.” As always, waste not, want not.