Watched a simple introduction movie of Shigeru Ban from New York Times and some related readings here."Ban’s interest in simple, easily transported, reusable materials surfaced in another project that made him famous and particularly admired. In a field where humanitarian relief work isn’t exactly commonplace, Ban devised shelters for refugees in Rwanda made of slender paper tubes. This led him to do temporary housing — log cabins with paper-tube walls for disaster victims — first in response to the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, where he also built a paper church, and later in Turkey and India. Having put up some of the money himself, he persuaded local companies to donate materials. In Kobe, he used yellow plastic Kirin beer crates filled with sandbags as foundations. The average cost per house was $2,000, though it is the elegance as much as the economy of the architecture that has distinguished Ban. His works are airy, curvaceous, balletic. An heir to Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Niemeyer, to Japanese traditional architecture and to Alvar Aalto, he is an old-school Modernist with a poet’s touch and an engineer’s inventiveness. " to find out more...
Passage from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/magazine/20shigeru-t.html?pagewanted=1
Image from http://www.shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_WORKS/SBA_PAPER/SBA_PAPER_15/SBA_paper_15.html
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