Interview

Shigeru Ban, international architecture superstar, is considered by many to be something of a brilliant Gyro Gearloose character in his field. A seminal “green” architect before ecology became fashionable, the Japanese mastermind has created spectacular buildings out of the most unexpected material: tubes of paper. Since he first pioneered his paper structures—best evidenced in his now-iconic Paper Church in Kobe, Japan—he has been constantly searching for new materials to recycle.

Recently he’s been thinking about using sand to create buildings in Dubai. The 51-year-old Ban is fascinated by technical prowess,but he is also sensitive to a certain morality in architecture. A former consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, he is renowned for being an “emergency architect,” capable of intervening rapidly to create temporary structures, as was the case after the Kobe earthquakes in 1995, for the Congo refugees in Rwanda in 1999, and again in China’sSichuan Province in 2008. I met up with him in Paris this past January in his “temporary paper studio” (conceived like a long ship’s cabin), which has literally been anchored to the sixth story of the Centre Pompidou since 2004. Dressed in black and surrounded by a team of 10, BAN is currently working on his most eagerly awaited project of the moment: the Centre Pompidou-Metz satellite museum, in Metz, France, to becompleted next fall.

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JUDITH BENHAMOU-HUET: Where do you come from?

SHIGERU BAN: From the Empire of the Rising Sun. [laughs] I like saying that. It’s also a reference to the Japanese flag. But usually in Japan my friends tell me I don’t behave like I’m Japanese.

BENHAMOU-HUET: Why? Do you think you’re not typically Japanese?

BAN: This week I’ll be spending about four days in Paris, then I’ll be going to my New York office for about four days, then to Tokyo for about the same length of time. I constantly live at that pace. I travel a lot. Japanese culture is very ancient and very strong. That’s why most people who commission work from Japanese architects expect them to create works that have an element of exoticism, the kind typical of Japanese culture. I don’t do that.

BENHAMOU-HUET: Did you always want to be an architect?

BAN: I started wanting to be an architect at the age of 12. I made a model of a house for a craftwork class at school. It was a big house that swiveled around and lit up.

BENHAMOU-HUET: When did you decide to leave Japan for abroad?

BAN: My mother was a fashion designer, and she used to come to Paris regularly for the shows. I would go and wait for her at the airport and, when we got home, I would open up her suitcase and discover incredible things: a Swiss watch, a beautiful leather jacket . . . It was from that time that I kept a fascination for everything foreign. Later on, I wanted to become a designer, and one of my teachers preparing us for art school advised me to follow a more general training. At his home, he had a scale model that had been made by the director of the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York. I was fascinated by it. I went to study in Los Angeles for three years, for administrative reasons, then I went to finish my studies in New York, at Cooper Union, as had been my wish. That’s why my work isn’t more exotic. My references are international.