April 18, 2011
Sendai and environs will require temporary architecture to house those displaced by the March 11 tsunami. There’s need for both immediate relief shelters and longer-term temporary housing. One of the world’s most famous architects of disaster relief structures is himself Japanese: Shigeru Ban has worked extensively with the United Nations on varities of relief architecture, and is an expert on the use of paper for such structures (see this previous post).
August 16, 2010
Shigeru Ban is well known for his paper architecture, in particular the emergency structures designed for regions struck by disaster, notably houses for the Japanese city of Kobe hit by a devastating earthquake in 1995, and a series of paper tent structures for the UN High Commission for Refugees in Rwanda in 1999.
August 13, 2009
This is the paper-based pavilion designed by Arthur Erickson for the UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements that took place in Vancouver in June of 1976. The pavilion, part of Habitat’s exhibit, was erected in front of the old courthouse (now the Vancouver Art Gallery).
June 20, 2009
Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland, built between 1937 and 1939 as a rural retreat, is considered one of the greatest houses of the 20th century. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who curated a major retrospective of Aalto’s work at the Barbican in London in 2007, says photographs give no real sense of Aalto’s buildings.
