Pritzker Prize for Architecture

As you may know, I am president of the Board of the Baltimore Architecture Foundation and I also sit on the Board of the Baltimore Chapter of the AIA. I’ve always been interested in architecture and follow it closely.

So I was interested to learn that the profession’s most prestigious prize, The Pritzker was just awarded to Japanese architect, Shigeru Ban. He’s not a big “starchitect” like Frank Gehry, but someone who works with people in a time of need and who works with easily and locally accessible materials.

In New Zealand, he built a cathedral out of cardboard tubes to replace the one which had been badly damaged in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.

He devised the Paper Partition System to give families some privacy when they’re living in shelters, such as this one after the 2011 Japanese earthquake.

He also created homes out of shipping containers after the Japanese tsunami.

These paper-log houses were built after the Kobe earthquake.

Ban plays with materials in unusual ways. In the 1995 Curtain Wall House, he uses double height curtains to conceal and reveal.

It is so refreshing to see someone who uses architecture for the good others, and not for some crazy vanity project, win an award like the Pritzker Prize.

Now, they just need to award it to some women architects!