He Designs Buildings Of Paper

An architect known for his unconventional choice of building materials -- sand, beer crates, even paper -- may be headed for superstardom.

1 minute read

November 1, 2005, 6:00 AM PST

By Brenda Meyer


"Shigeru Ban is not your average architect...Ban is known for his achievements with paper: he is to paper what Le Corbusier was to concrete, or Norman Foster is to steel. He has spent a good portion of his career exploring its possibilities and repositioning it as a viable, potentially invaluable, building material for the future. In doing so, he might have exposed a giant hole in our current assessment of what good architecture really is...

The idea of building with paper seems riddled with problems - it is flammable, vulnerable to water, weak and temporary, but Ban turns all these arguments upside down..."

Monday, October 31, 2005 in The Guardian

portrait of professional woman

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