Day #6

Shigeru Ban is a Japanese architect who graduated from Cooper Union in 1984. As a child, he demonstrated a strong interest in architectural poetics, which influenced all of his later works. He has designed a number of iconic buildings, including the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the Aspen Art Museum in the U.S. He is well known for his work in paper and cardboard architecture and also assists many humanitarian relief efforts across the globe.

In 2022, the Voluntary Architects’ Network (VAN) and Shigeru Ban Architects provided the Paper Partition System (PPS) for shelters for the increasing number of refugees staying in neighboring countries of Ukraine. This system has been used in numerous evacuation centers in Japanese regions hit by disasters, such as the Great East Japan Earthquake (2011), the Kumamoto Earthquake (2016), the Hokkaido Earthquake (2018), and the torrential rains in southern Kyushu (2020).

In 2014, he received the Pritzker Architecture Prize for his work. The Blue Ocean Dome Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka was designed by Shigeru Ban, with one of the three domes constructed entirely from laminated bamboo, another being the world’s first architectural dome made entirely from carbon fiber reinforced plastic, and the third from recyclable paper tubes.