Shigeru Ban | A book, a beauty, a basic need

You’ve heard the phrase before. You’ve asked yourself the question. “If walls could talk …”

If walls could talk, what would they say? What would they witness? If walls could talk, what would they keep? What would they throw away? If walls could talk – those impartial partitions, those secret compartments, those faceless facades – what would they whisper between compartments?

“If walls could talk” is a question that Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Shigeru Ban answers with his life’s work. Ban is known for his ingenious and intuitive use of recycled materials, and his architectural style is characterized by his relentless pursuit of understanding and interpreting the purpose of buildings. Ban is convinced that buildings are not mere skyscrapers subject to gravity, but structures that are meant to serve and protect. With a new book from the German publisher Taschen, Ban opens a window into his mind.

Compiled by author Philip Jodidio, the book lays out a timeline of Ban’s architectural genius since 1985. It includes some of his most famous works, including the Wall-less House in Nagano (where walls, if they could talk, would say nothing), the Cardboard Cathedral in New Zealand, and the Japan Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Germany.

Although Ban is in the construction business, his work is perhaps best characterized by his keen ability to destroy. Temporary architecture has become Ban’s niche, designing emergency shelters for refugees fleeing natural disasters and genocide. While an architect would measure the strength of a wall by its ability to endure, withstand, and remain, Ban measures it by something less severe, namely his signature element: reused paper tubes. Though sometimes as thin as a toilet roll, Ban’s structures made of recycled paper prove that muscle power is not brutalist. In fact, paper is a promise in a sporadic and fickle world.

Thanks to Ban’s efforts, Paper Emergency Centers housed refugees fleeing the civil war in Rwanda in 1999. In 2007, compressed blocks of earth provided shelter for Sri Lankan families after the tsunami. In 2011, a Paper Concert Hall filled the Italian city of L’Aquila with music after the village was struck by an earthquake in 2009. And recently, a surgical department for a hospital in Lviv, Ukraine, is under construction. Ban’s architectural firm, Shigeru Ban Architects, is working with the nonprofit Voluntary Architects’ Network to efficiently build temporary housing out of beer crates, wood and rubble.

There’s something almost poetic about how Ban uses unusual materials to prop up vulnerable communities. What’s thrown away is supported, what’s overlooked is prioritized. As Taschen’s new hardback volume shows, weak elements are fortresses in the architect’s eyes. If walls could talk, Ban says they could help too. They could beautify. They could save.