Architect Shigeru Ban was born in Tokyo in 1957. He attended the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and later the Cooper Union School of Architecture. In 1985, he opened Shigeru Ban Architects (SBA).
Ban has received more than 25 awards for his inspiring contributions to the architecture and design world, including the MIPIM Awards in 2007, where he won first prize for residential developments. In 2002 he won the “Best House in The World” Prize for his revolutionary Naked House at the World Architecture Awards. He has received two honorary fellowships from The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and The American Institute of Architects. In 2001 Time Magazine named him “Innovator of the Year.”
The new Aspen Art Museum will be SBA’s first U.S. museum to be constructed. Regarding his design for the new building, Ban explains: “In any design I always strive for a unified relationship between the structure and its surroundings. The design for the new Aspen Art Museum is a very exciting opportunity to create a harmony between Aspen’s existing architecture and the surrounding beauty of the natural landscape.”
BACKGROUND
Shigeru Ban is critically heralded for his innovative approaches to environmentally sound architecture as well as his devotion to humanitarian efforts in the wake of some of the most devastating natural and man-made disasters of the past two decades.
Referring to Ban as “The Accidental Environmentalist,” New York Times chief art critic and columnist Michael Kimmelman described him as “an heir to Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Niemeyer, to Japanese traditional architecture and to Alvar Aalto.” “He is an old-school Modernist with a poet’s touch,” Kimmelman added, “and an engineer’s inventiveness.”
Ban designed and implemented temporary shelters for victims of Kobe, Japan’s 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, as well as offering his services to the United Nations in aid of the victims of the 1999 civil war in Rwanda.
His participation in designing and implementing both temporary and permanent housing solutions for residents of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have garnered him global accolades. Ban was one of only 13 architects selected by actor/humanitarian Brad Pitt for his Make It Right Foundation project.
Recently, Ban collaborated with professors and students from Universidad Iberoamericana and Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra of the Dominican Republic to build 100 shelters made of paper tubes and local materials for victims of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince in January 2010. He is currently preparing the deployment of simple partition construction elements for evacuees taking shelter in the Tohoku region of Japan following the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami.
