By Zaevior Byrd-Watson

When you’re in a conversation about architecture, your brain immediately goes to metals, stones, or other generic foundation materials. Nobody expects to hear that someone is using paper tubes and cardboard to create living spaces. Going to the Japan Information and Culture Center (JICC) on July 10 was very eye opening. The speaker during the first part of our program was Gabrielle Headly, who we had met earlier in the program, and who now guided us through the exhibit and shared the history behind Shigeru Ban and his peculiar building ideas.

Ban’s style of architecture was an interesting one, beginning back in 1986 with experimentation, and humanitarian aid beginning in 1995. During that time, he worked on his first major project: designing low cost, easy to build houses out of paper tubes for Japanese disaster victims following the Kobe, Japan earthquake. These homes, despite being built of a widely known fragile material, were very sturdy, and allowed for sustainable living.

Ban’s style is a very intriguing one to me, because who thought one man could put together a whole organization solely for disaster aid, let alone with paper and cardboard?? Shigeru Ban is a huge inspiration for me to innovate and be more creative with my works, and I’d love to research more about him.

Something I’d like to briefly talk about is his Paper Partition System, used in Noto, Japan following their earthquake in 2024. The Paper Partition System provided privacy and homes for families who were victims of the earthquake. These systems were deployed all over workplaces, gyms, and community centers, allowing many people to be guaranteed to have a safe place to live while dealing with their circumstances.

Being an extension of Ban’s already innovative paper log houses, the PPS was already majorly impressive, garnering respect from not only the citizens of Japan, but many humanitarian aid organizations as well. Shigeru Ban was and still is an impressive architect, and his influence is still around today, you just have to look for it.

Thank you for reading my blog post,

じゃあまた (˶>⩊<˶), Zaevior