Shigeru Ban: Humanitarian Architecture - Hardcover

The most thorough book available on Ban’s emergency shelters. His work in emergency response design and development is such a core part of his oeuvre, it would be difficult to understand or appreciate his more high-profile projects without it. (Andrew Michler Inhabitat)

By focusing on Ban’s designs for those who “haven’t had the voice to ask for them,” Humanitarian Architecture provides inspiration for those who believe that thoughtful design, equal parts compassion and concept, contributes in powerful ways toward the greater good. (Rachel Pulfer Azure)

Humanitarian Architecture provides inspiration for those who believe that thoughtful design, equal parts compassion and concept, contributes in powerful ways toward the greater good. (Kari Silver Azure)

The 280 page volume offers a multi-faceted account of the simple, low-cost strcutures that the Japanese architect has been producing for displaced people the world over for the past two decades. Through essays, interviews, and a richly illustrated project index, which includes many of Ban's hand drawings, a vivid portrait of the architect emerges that foregrounds his thoughtfulness and compassion alongside his architectural ingenuity.

Shigeru Ban: Humanitarian Architecture is an invaluable resource on the architect's work, and could well serve as inspiration for altruistically inclined designers-considering the tens of millions of displaced people in the world today, whether through natural disasters or war, the need for architects like Ban are greater than ever. (Jesse Coburn Pin-Up)

The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has created humanitarian shelters for disaster sites in New Zealand, China, and Japan; conceived a nomadic exhibition space that traveled around the world; and collaborated on the Centre Pompidou outpost in Metz, France. Now comes the first permanent museum the 2014 Pritzker Prize winner has designed on his own: the $45 million Aspen Art Museum, set against the striking mountains of Colorado, which opens on August 9 to coincive with the institution's 35th anniversary. (Fan Zhong W Magazine)

Certainly the architect Shigeru Ban is one of our era's prime examples of this kind of visionary. The 56-year-old Ban, born in Japan and educated in the United States, has been rethinking and un-thinking stale conventional architectural ideas for 20 years- most radically, making humanitarian buildings quickly out of paper tubes for people affected by natural disasters. Finally the rest of the world is catching up: He's the 2014 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, his profession's version of the Nobel Prize. (Ted Loos Cultured)