PEOPLE
Part of TASCHEN’s XXL series on renowned architects, Shigeru Ban Complete Works 1985–Today by American historian Philip Jodidio covers the architect’s career from early residential work in Japan to the famed Paper Tube Emergency Shelters and the Nomadic Museum built with shipping containers.
By Rupal Rathore
9 September 2024
Shigeru Ban: Complete Works 1985—Today traces the Pritzker-winning architect’s inspirations, explorations, and breakthrough career moments | Image Courtesy of Shigeru Ban Architects
Shigeru Ban is one of the few Japanese architects to have studied abroad and even fewer who have built outside Japan. The 2024 TASCHEN release Shigeru Ban Complete Works 1985–Today by American historian Philip Jodidio records a total of 87 projects by Shigeru Ban Architects and underlines the key ideas that inform Ban’s design practice.
The Harvard-educated author and former editor of Connaissance des Arts conducted private interviews with Ban, back in 2008, to compile the 696-page monograph. After 15 years in the making, the XXL publication was officially launched at TASCHEN’s Paris store in July, featuring an exclusive book signing by the architect himself. Jodidio’s previous TASCHEN books include the Homes for Our Time series and monographs on other renowned architects including Norman Foster, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, and Zaha Hadid.
Simose Museum featuring ten villa-like accommodations that face the Seto Inland Sea in Hiroshima, Japan, completed in 2023 | Image Courtesy of TASCHEN
The book’s opening essay Shigeru Ban Finding Forms humanizes the starchitect’s persona by presenting the breakthrough moments of Ban’s career as anecdotal stories. Here, Jodidio unpacks how “the personality and drive of Shigeru Ban have a direct pertinence in helping to understand his buildings.” The 8-page spread is split into digestible nuggets, some pulling on specific project commissions and Ban’s exploration of different building materials, while others note the architect’s primary inspirations such as the Japanese structural engineer Gengo Matsui, the American architect John Hejduk, the German architect and engineer Frei Otto, and the British-Sri Lankan engineer Cecil Balmond. “Few are likely to think of these figures as a source of inspiration for a younger Japanese architect,” Jodidio observes, “but this is rather a cosmopolitan way that Shigeru Ban has gone about creating his personal pantheon, his starting points in creativity and design.”
A simple partition system made of paper tubes and cloth to provide temporary shelter to Ukrainian refugees in Paris, France, completed in 2022 | Image Courtesy of Voluntary Architects’ Network
Following the essay, the 87 chronologically-arranged projects offer a mix of Ban’s famed buildings such as the temporary Nomadic Museum installed in New York, Santa Monica, and Tokyo; the Simose Museum in Hiroshima; the Centre Pompidou-Metz; and the Swatch/Omega Campus in Biel/Bienne, as well as his ongoing disaster relief effort such as the temporary partition system to house Ukrainian refugees in Paris.
More interestingly, the monograph traces the timeline of Ban’s revolutionary use of paper tubes as an architectural material, from partition walls in an indoor exhibition in Tokyo to refugee shelters erected in harsh environments across Rwanda, Turkey, India, Italy, China, Japan, and Haiti. It is this humanitarian response to catastrophic natural disasters over 30 years that earned him the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2014.
The farm-to-table Haru Sansan Farmer’s Restaurant in Hyogo, Japan, completed in 2022 | Image Courtesy of Hiroyuki Hirai
As a fresh graduate from the Cooper Union School of Architecture, Ban worked in the office of the late Japanese architect Arata Isozaki for a year before founding his firm in 1985. With the assistance of his former employer, Ban won his debut commission as the exhibition designer for a series of three shows at the Axis Gallery in Tokyo where he made his very first use of paper. “They had a limited budget, but I also hated the idea of using a precious material such as wood for a temporary exhibition,” Ban is quoted in the book. “I looked for some alternative material to replace wood for the partitions or ceilings and I thought maybe the paper tubes I had saved from the Ambasz show [the first in the exhibition trio] could be the right solution”.
Ban’s first landmark project outside Japan — the Centre Pompidou-Metz, France, completed in 2010 | Image Courtesy of Didier Boy de la Tour
Fast forward to 2003, Ban won the design competition for the Pompidou-Metz, which was envisioned by the French authorities to have the same impact as Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ seminal design for the Pompidou Centre in Paris, built in 1977. When Ban’s building finally opened in Metz in 2010, its distinctive woven timber roof and three suspended 90 x 15-meter galleries decidedly opened the channel for other international commissions in the years to come.
Highlighting the Pompidou-Metz as the reason why “Ban has spent a great deal of his time outside Japan,” Jodidio opens his essay with a rather telling story. After being announced the winner for the project, Ban half-jokingly suggested to Pompidou’s president at the time that the agreed fee was not sufficient for a foreign firm like theirs to rent an office in Paris. This worked out in the architect’s favor as he was granted permission to erect a temporary site office built out of paper tubes on the terrace of the center’s Paris building — with Renzo Piano’s approval of course.
Ban’s competition-winning design for the Swatch/Omega Campus in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, completed in 2019 | Image Courtesy of Swatch
Today, Ban’s offices in Tokyo, Paris, and New York continue to test the boundaries of recyclable materials such as wood, as evidenced by two ongoing projects featured at the end of the monograph — a surgical hospital in the war-torn country of Ukraine, which is to be constructed primarily out of cross-laminated timber, and the Kentucky Owl Park in Louisville comprising three pyramidal wood structures with sporadic diamond-shaped openings in their clad surfaces. “The vocabulary of Shigeru Ban is one of finding unique solutions, of solving problems,” concludes Jodidio. “As he says himself, he is not a form-giver but, instead, a form-finder.”
Ban’s temporary traveling Nomadic Museum built out of shipping containers and paper tubes, installed in New York (2005), Santa Monica (2006), and Tokyo (2007) | Image Courtesy of Michael Moran
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Shigeru Ban. Complete Works 1985—Today
Shigeru Ban, Philip Jodidio
TASCHEN
Hardcover, 30.8 x 39 cm (12.1 x 15.4 in.), 6.848 kg (15.1 lb), 696 pages
€ 200 | £ 200
The multilingual monograph (English, French, German) is also available as an Art Edition with a signed print of a sketch by Shigeru Ban and a wooden custom-built 3D laser-cut cover.
