A valuable insight into the works and mind of Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, whose career TASCHEN has followed from the beginning. Author Philip Jodidio explores highly-anticipated completed buildings, new projects, and the future outlook for the Shigeru Ban studio. This monograph is a journey through the evolution of an architect whose name was made with true architectural marvels, unsurpassed for innovation, elegance, and sensibility. Next to early buildings that use paper tubes as structural elements are more recent projects, including the environmentally friendly and disaster-resilient Toyota City Museum, the Blue Ocean Dome pavilion for the 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo, and a penthouse atop of a 140-year-old landmark cast-iron house in New York City.  View the Swatch/Omega Campus in Switzerland, and La Seine Musicale, a concert hall inserted into an overall master plan conceived by Jean Nouvel for Île Seguin in France, plus many others. 

Ban’s work is characterized by a quest to understand buildings and a commitment to save and use otherwise discarded materials, which led him to inventive solutions and to claim the material paper as the staple for several of his projects. Along with this ambition, Ban gave a face to Japanese architecture while staying in touch with his unique architectural handwriting, allowing him to create a magnitude of projects worldwide. The Pritzker Prize-winning architect’s notoriety hasn’t kept him from devoting his talent and innovative ideas to those in need. He has built shelters for refugees in Rwanda and Sri Lanka, and used his paper-tube structures to quickly erect emergency accommodations in Fukushima and Ukraine. With his generous, problem-solving approach, Shigeru Ban exemplifies humanitarian architecture and keeps pushing the boundaries of his trade.