Ban, who has been celebrated for his socially conscious architecture, says, “I have no interest in ‘Green,’ ‘Eco,’ and ‘Environmentally Friendly.’ I just hate wasting things.”Credit Photograph by Kosuke Okahara.

The architect of the dispossessed meets the one per cent.

The main campus of Vitra, a Swiss furniture company that produces Frank Gehry’s Wiggle chair, is an Epcot of contemporary architecture. It includes buildings by Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, and Tadao Ando; a fire station by Zaha Hadid; and an elegant white factory, shaped like a slice of eight-minute egg, by the minimalist Japanese firm Sanaa. All these architects have won the Pritzker Prize, the field’s highest honor. The work of this year’s laureate, Shigeru Ban, has also been displayed at Vitra. Huddled on a lawn, his structures, three fifty-dollar tents sheathed in standard-issue plastic tarps from the U.N., intended for the refugees of the Rwandan civil war, looked as if any minute they might be loaded on a pallet and removed. Ban’s work lay underneath the plastic: a simple skeleton of recycled-paper tubes, fitted together with plastic joints and braced with ropes describing the pattern of an unfinished star. Ban, who has built museums, mansions, corporate headquarters, and a golf-course clubhouse in South Korea, takes pleasure in distinguishing himself from his peers, and in pointing up their excesses: not much of their work could fit into a kit that comprises eleven elements (Paper Tube A, Paper Tube B, plastic peg), including the bag. “This company has the most expensive collection of architecture,” he says. “My tents became their cheapest collection.”

In a profession often associated with showmanship and ego, Ban’s work appears humble, and appropriate to a historical moment that celebrates altruism, or its posture. The Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, a member of the Pritzker jury, told me that he was moved by Ban’s commitment to the dispossessed. “The world is filled with billions of people, and most of them live in conditions where they will never see an architect or an architect-designed space,” he said. “To have a first-rate architect pay attention to those in need of shelter, and build better-quality buildings to serve their aesthetic and human needs—that is wonderful.”...Continue Reading

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