NOWA
Shigeru Ban lives and works in Tokyo, where he teaches architecture at Keio University. The current scope of his practice - houses, museums, pavilions, and other public projects on several continents - belies a relatively quiet early career in Tokyo. Following studies at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC) and graduation from The Cooper Union in New York, he established his own firm in Toyko in 1985. During next decade, Ban built a following in Japan by designing dozens of unique small houses, exhibitions, and other projects using alternative, environmentally friendly materials: paper, wood, bamboo, and prefabricated paper products. Following the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, Ban responded by designing emergency temporary housing he calls Paper Log Houses, made out of paper logs, waterproof sponge tape, and beer crates that could be assembled in a matter of hours by volunteers and provided shelter for hundreds of displaced residents. Following on the success of this project, from 1995 to 2000 Ban was a consultant to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, advising on temporary housing for displaced populations in Rwanda, Turkey, and India. He established the Voluntary Architects' Network (VAN) in 1995, an organization that continues to promote such humanitarian assistance by architects. Ban has won several awards, including the Kansai Architect Grand Prize in 1996, and Best Young Architect of the Year from the Japan Institute of Architecture in 1997. Ban's notoriety began to spread rapidly beyond Japan when he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's "Un-Private House" exhibition in 1999 with his Curtain Wall House in Tokyo, a glass-and-steel house where privacy is controlled by means of monumental, two-story-high curtains along two glass facades that can be opened or closed. The following year Ban designed his first museum project in the United States, also at MoMA: "Paper Arch," an installation of cardboard tubes in a canopy over the museum's sculpture garden. Also in 2000, he collaborated with German architect Frei Otto to design the Japan Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, a recyclable, organic-shaped structure of paper stretched over a paper tube armature
