Shigeru Ban (1957- ) is a Japanese architect who was just awarded the 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The prestigious award honors a living architect whose work has contributed to humanity and the built environment. Ban was born in Tokyo and educated at the Tokyo University of the Arts, Southern California Institute of Architecture and Cooper Union's School of Architecture.
Although he is perhaps best known for his humanitarian work designing homes for victims of natural disasters, he has also designed numerous residential, commercial and civic structures.
His disaster relief structures make use of products that can easily be procured and then recycled when no longer needed. He first began to build homes for disaster victims from cardboard tubes in 1994 in Rwanda. A year later he designed the Paper Log Houses after the earthquake in Kobe, Japan. These houses had foundations of beer crates held in place by sandbags and had canvas roofs, which provided natural lighting.
His Aspen Art Museum is scheduled to open in August of this year.
From shigeurbanarchitects.com, nytimes.com and houzz.com
All images from shigerubanarchitects.com
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| Furniture House - Yamanashi, Japan |
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| Crescent House - Shizuoka, Japan |
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| Sagaponac House - Long Island, New York, USA |
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| House Overlooking the Park - Tokyo, Japan |
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| Tamedia Office Building - Zurich, Switzerland |
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| Paper Log House - Kobe, Japan |
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| Paper Log House - Bhuj, India |
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| Post Hurricane House - New Orleans, Louisiana, USA |
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| Aspen Art Museum - Aspen, Colorado, USA |
