Shigeru Ban was born in 1957 in Tokyo. He studied architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and then at the Cooper Union in New York with John Hejduk. He returned to Japan and opened his studio in 1985. His early works were conventional — private houses, small commercial buildings. But in 1989 he began experimenting with cardboard tubes: cylindrical structures of recycled paper, waterproofed with special coatings, traditionally used to wind fabrics or photographic film. They are cheap, light, recyclable, and — surprisingly — as structurally resistant as concrete or steel for certain types of load.
The turning point came in 1994, during the genocide in Rwanda. Ban read that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was supplying refugees with tents and plastic — expensive, non-local, non-recyclable materials. He proposed to UNHCR to use cardboard tubes as the structure for shelters. UNHCR initially refused — paper is not a serious material. Ban went to Rwanda at his own expense, built prototypes with the refugees, and showed they worked. UNHCR accepted. Ban was 37 and had just invented modern emergency architecture.
The Paper Church in Kobe
After the Kobe earthquake of 1995, Ban built the “Paper Church” — a temporary church made of cardboard tubes for the Nagata community, where the original church had been destroyed. 58 cardboard tubes 33 cm in diameter, arranged in an ellipse, hold up a light tensile structure on top. The church has no walls — the structure of tubes is translucent, and at night it lights up from inside like a lantern. It was temporary by definition — it was meant to last until the masonry church was rebuilt. It lasted ten years. In 2005 it was dismantled and later rebuilt in Taiwan (in Puli, in 2008), where a community hit by the 1999 earthquake had asked to have it.
Cardboard tubes are not simply paper. They are composite tubes — layers of Kraft paper glued on a core of recycled paper — with a compressive strength comparable to low-grade concrete. The strength depends on the diameter and wall thickness: a tube 33 cm in diameter with 15 mm walls carries loads of hundreds of kilograms. Ban uses these tubes both as vertical load-bearing elements and as horizontal arches, as beams, as curved roofs — exploiting the cylindrical form, which is intrinsically resistant to bending.
The Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch
The Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand (2013) is Ban's first paper structure conceived as a permanent — or at least semi-permanent (50 years) — building. The February 2011 earthquake had destroyed Christchurch's Anglican Cathedral — an 1864 stone building, an icon of the city. The definitive reconstruction will take decades (and tens of millions of dollars). Ban proposed a transitional cathedral in paper tubes and metal shipping containers: 98 cardboard tubes 60 cm in diameter form the nave in a triangular “A” shape. The roof is polycarbonate panels. The side containers form the aisles and support the structure. 700 people.
Which is exactly the opposite of what is commonly thought about emergency architecture: it is not inferior to permanent architecture. It is a different response to a different moment. The Cardboard Cathedral has already become a tourist attraction in Christchurch — thousands of people visit it every year even during the construction of the new stone cathedral. The temporary has become a landmark of the city. Emergency architecture is also civic architecture.