This week, Shigeru Ban will receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Does he deserve it?

Workers in Chengdu, China, assemble the Hualin Temporary Elementary School, designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. / Forgemind ArchiMedia

To win the Pritzker Prize for architecture is like winning a Nobel Prize for literature. The chosen laureate ascends into the pantheon of their art, and critics of that art take to second-guessing the jury’s decision.

Two years ago, when the relatively young and little-known Wang Shu became the first Chinese national to win the Pritzker, his selection was widely read as a political statement, though the meaning of that statement was open to question. Was this some kind of sop to China, or was it a coded rebuke, given the winner’s borderline-dissident stance against his country’s relentless vertical urbanization?

This year’s winner, who receives the award on June 13, is the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Though a bigger name than Wang, at fifty-six Ban is also young for what is often seen as a lifetime achievement award. 

In Ban’s case, the question for critics is whether he won on artistic and technical merit, or for his pro bono work in disaster zones, building temporary homes and schools for the displaced survivors of earthquakes and genocides. Endorsing the jury’s decision, chairman Thomas Pritzker—son and heir of the late Chicago industrialist Jay Pritzker, who founded the award in 1979—put a fine point on Ban’s “commitment to humanitarian causes.” “Shigeru has made our world a better place,” he said.

Responding to the announcement at a roundtable hosted by Architect magazine, a group of critics duly recognised the ad hoc grace and elegance of Ban’s design solutions in extremis. They acknowledged his ingenious use of available, sustainable, recyclable materials—most notably the paper tubing that has become his hallmark and from which he built his so-called Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch after the New Zealand earthquake of January 2011.

As Architect staffer Carolina A. Miranda put it, “On a political level . . . Ban was a really smart choice on behalf of the Pritzker jury . . . difficult to quibble with.” Difficult, but not impossible.

Ethics are one thing, aesthetics another. The critics also shared the view that Ban’s private commissions were not nearly so impressive, his highest-profile commercial work being the poorly received regional Pompidou Center in Metz, France. Since that structure opened to the public in 2010, many professional observers have had unflattering things to say about its hat-like roof and hangar-like atrium.

'I think it is important, psychologically, after all the mental damage of the disaster, that people should see something beautiful,' Ban says.

The British writer Tim Abrahams called it “one of the ugliest buildings in France” when I contacted him for comment. Abrahams—former editor of Blueprint magazine and author of The Stadium, an architectural study of 2012 London Olympics—tweeted something caustic about Ban within minutes of the Pritzker announcement. Invited to expand on this, Abrahams said, “I just don’t think he’s a very good architect.” He went on to tell me that he was unable to get past the “kooky, Middle Earthy, Hobbity” element he detected in Ban’s designs.

Abrahams suggested that this year’s Pritzker jury was effectively paying lip service to the fashionable ideals of social and ecological responsibility that Ban is supposed to represent, thus encouraging the profession “to feel good about itself.”

On the phone from Paris, Ban himself did not care to speculate on why he had won the Pritzker, but agreed with some of his critics that the jury may have made certain allowances in his case. “They must have changed the criteria,” he said, having himself been a juror from 2006 to 2009. “Otherwise I’m sure that I would not have won.” “I don’t think that I would give the prize to myself,” he concluded....Continue Reading

> via bostonreview.net