Cardboard crazy! Scavenger genius Shigeru Ban on building cathedrals and quake shelters with paper

2026-02-17 - 16:33

From high-end boutiques to housing in disaster zones with beer-crate foundations, the Japanese architect creates with things people throw away. What will his distillery in whisky’s holy land look like? ‘I don’t like waste,” says Shigeru Ban. It’s a simple statement – yet it encapsulates everything about the Japanese architect’s work. He takes materials others might overlook or discard – from cardboard tubes to beer crates, styrofoam to shipping containers – and subjects them to a kind of alchemy, refining rough edges and transforming fragility into sturdiness. The outcome is a perpetually ingenious and curiously poetic scavenger architecture that finds beauty and purpose in the everyday. From high-end boutiques to housing for refugees, Ban’s buildings blur the lines between eastern and western design traditions, between the luxurious and the ordinary, and between what constitutes a temporary building and permanent one. Continue reading...