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.” Photograph by Kosuke Okahara.

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.”

With a team of student volunteers, Ban has touched down at nearly every major natural-disaster site of the past two decades. The arc of his career tracks the rise of cataclysmic weather as page-one news: the Kobe earthquake, which killed six thousand people (1995); the magnitude-7.4 earthquake in Turkey that left half a million homeless (1999); the Gujarat earthquake (2001); the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004); Hurricane Katrina (2005); the Sichuan earthquake (2008); the L’Aquila earthquake (2009); Haiti, Tohoku, the Philippines. Ban’s practice, according to Riichi Miyake, a scholar of Japanese architecture, is “an architectural iteration of Doctors Without Borders.”

Ban, who is fifty-seven, has pillowy lips and lids, and a barrel-shaped body perpetually swathed in softly pleated black linen; behind him trails a small black suitcase on wheels. He looks clicked together, like a Lego figurine. (He used to play rugby, No. 8.) A black pen with a red dot on its clip—a sole concession to color—is tucked between two buttons on his shirt. His mother, a dressmaker with a small atelier on the second floor of his suburban Tokyo studio, designs his clothes. In addition to Tokyo, he has two other offices, in Paris and in New York, and some seventy employees. Masako Ban, the wife he rarely sees, makes accessories and women’s pocketbooks inspired by industrial materials. They don’t have children.

On August 9th, Ban will mark the public opening of the Aspen Art Museum, his first permanent museum in the United States. The building, a glass box nested in a lattice screen made from resin-infused paper and topped with a timber truss roof, is an astonishing plexus of materials pushed to their limits. Materials—in his case, paper tubes, shipping containers, beer crates, sustainably sourced wood—and their capabilities have always been Ban’s primary concern, placing his work in sharp contrast to the spectacular, parametric, digitally derived architecture that dominates today. “I’m not the architect to make a shape,” he told me firmly. “My designs are always problem solving.” Rafael Viñoly, who worked on a team with Ban in 2002 to propose a design for the new World Trade Center—they made it to the final round—says, “This is a guy that still thinks architecture is about building, the mechanical part of building and what the building does. Architecture is not writing or talking, it’s building buildings.”

“Beautiful—that’s all we need to sue them into oblivion.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

Toyo Ito, another Japanese Pritzker winner, wrote in an e-mail, “Many architects in the world today are competing only for the beauty of the architectural form. Ban-san’s attempt is a counter-punch against these architects, and I think he represents a new model of a ‘socially responsible’ architect.” To many in the field, though, Ban represents a conundrum. “I don’t know exactly what to do with him, really,” Kenneth Frampton, a noted architecture critic who teaches at Columbia, told me. “Underlying his work is an idea of a minimalism based on the notion of energy and ecological sustainability. He’s connected to the Japanese tradition, but also very influenced by America and a Yankee-tinker attitude, which was Buckminster Fuller’s approach. It’s a value-free technical performance, detached from anything you could call a critical cultural position.” Like Fuller, who was obsessed by structural and engineering questions but indifferent to the dialogue around aesthetics, Ban labors at his private puzzles and patents his inventions. Whatever meanings may be embedded in his materials—globalism, consumerism, thrift—he will not be the one to tease them out. “I am not reflecting on it,” he says. Another time, he wrote to me, “I do not know the meaning of ‘Green Architect.’ I have no interest in ‘Green,’ ‘Eco,’ and ‘Environmentally Friendly.’ I just hate wasting things.”

Ban counts stubbornness as one of his great strengths, but he is not entirely free of self-consciousness: he had to interrupt his Pritzker acceptance speech, flustered, he said, because “Rem is looking at me.” In March, when the prize was announced, Patrik Schumacher, a partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, posted on Facebook, “I worry if the criteria of the Pritzker Prize . . . are now also being diverted in the direction of political correctness.” To others, Ban’s focus is so far from the aesthetic concerns of the discipline that he poses no threat at all. Tod Williams, a prominent New York architect who taught Ban and likes him, said, “It’s barely architecture. There’s no real depth to the work, and that’s why it’s a good, clear message.”

In airports, Ban is quick. Catching up to him is embarrassing. You may choose to lag. A comfortable range is one where you can see the small bald spot on the top of his head and know that you could reach him at a sprint. He is a hard man to buy a sandwich for. If you succeed, you must ask him questions while he chews. (Is it a conversation if one of you is also writing e-mails on his iPad?) He exasperates quickly. Many things are too complicated to explain. You must read his official biography, on the Web site of the Pritkzer Foundation. You must attend his upcoming public lecture. Parting ways, even when you are boarding the same plane, he will say, “See you tomorrow,” but it’s possible you will never see him again. His seat, in first, is in Row 1, by the aisle.