Living Large on Maple Street: Architect Shigeru Ban

Map It:  Columbia Heights   Judiciary Square 

AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA, the federal government gave people along the Gulf Coast formaldehyde-tainted trailers to live in (if it gave them anything at all).

But since 1995, earthquake refugees in Japan, Turkey and India, among other places, have received elegant paper-tube houses designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who has also created churches, museum installations and several unforgettable expo pavilions from paper and cardboard.

After studying at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Cooper Union, Ban caught critics' eyes with a series of villas in the mountains around Nagano, Japan, before he burst onto the global scene with his provisional houses built from pulp products.

The structures are not usually all paper — there is rain and fire to consider, so you might find plastics as well as bamboo or cane, but they seem always to satisfy the building-code cops. And they're typically not permanent but do recycle nicely.

In recent months, students from the Shigeru Ban Laboratory at Keio University in Japan have worked with students at the University of Virginia School of Architecture to build three full-on paper houses designed by Ban.

The houses are on view in Washington — two at the Meridian International Center and one outside the National Building Museum, where Ban, along with Karen Van Lengen, U.Va.'s architecture dean, will lead a talk with their students about the process of completing the houses, which seem to have the intelligence of an especially canny insect behind them.

» Meridian International Center, 1630 Crescent Place NW, free; 202-667-6800. (Columbia Heights)
» National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW, free; 202-272-2448. (Judiciary Square)

Written by Express contributor Bradford McKee
Image courtesy National Building Museum