Bamboo Roof

Bamboo Roof, an installation at Rice Gallery, brought the work of noted architect Shigeru Ban to the city of Houston for the first time. The project was collaboratively executed by architecture students from Rice University and the University of Houston.

Shigeru Ban first received international acclaim for his visionary use of cardboard tubing as a building material. He saw cardboard as “improved wood,” and his structures have proven the strength of ostensibly fragile paper; tubes that appear to be forms for concrete columns instead become columns themselves, while more slender, flexible lengths are used to form arching networks.

Ban has utilized cardboard tubing in everything from a gallery for fashion designer Issey Miyake to housing for the victims of the Kobe earthquake. The two projects are seemingly at opposite ends of the needs spectrum, one with high-end design as a priority and the other with basic shelter as the primary goal. Ban’s work asks us why those things should be mutually exclusive.

Ban had been experimenting with cardboard tubes ever since he used them as a low-cost alternative to wood in his 1986 design for an Alvar Aalto exhibition. His first cardboard building appeared in 1989, a columned arbor for a Nagoya regional expo. In 1994, Ban began work as a consultant to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the housing problems of the Rwandan refugee crisis, becoming well-versed in the multidimensional needs of refugees. He formulated the belief that “refugee shelter has to be beautiful. Psychologically, refugees are damaged. They have to stay in nice places.” Cardboard became a part of the solution.

Photo: Grant Suzuki, Shigeru Ban Architects, Tokyo, Japan

The earthquake that hit Kobe six months later gave Ban the opportunity to put his paper tube research into practice. A very poor area populated by Vietnamese immigrants had been one of the hardest hit. The residents were living under leaky plastic tarps in the cold, and the neighborhood’s church had been destroyed. The UNHCR’s original solution for refugee housing was to send a plastic sheet, an instruction book, and an ax. Refugees deforested vast areas trying to crib together shelter. When the UNHCR considered sending substitute framing materials like aluminum poles, there was the all-too-real danger that the material could be diverted along the way and sold by the unscrupulous for scrap.

Ban’s use of cardboard tubes was an ingenious and inexpensive solution because the materials often could be salvaged from industry. With student labor, Ban quickly built a community center and housing that had vertical tube walls topped by a plastic tarp. The final product was sturdy and functional—individual logs could be replaced if damaged—but it also had a clean-lined elegance. In Ban’s view, traumatized people do not have to be limited to the grimly functional—too often we view aesthetics as a luxury only the affluent can afford. In his refugee projects, Ban creates the best of all worlds with structures that are cost-efficient, functional, aesthetically pleasing, and environmentally friendly.

Ban also has employed paper in the creation of large-scale public structures. Collaborating with German architect Frei Otto, he constructed a giant paper pavilion for the environmentally themed EXPO 2000 in Hannover, Germany. Created from a visible grid of cardboard tubing covered by a shoji-screen-like paper skin, Ban’s Japanese Pavilion was dismantled and recycled at EXPO’s close, in keeping with the theme. In 2000, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted the architect’s 87-foot latticed arch of paper tubing in its sculpture garden.

Rice Gallery director Kimberly Davenport had seen Ban’s work and was struck by his ideas. “The beauty of the thinking captured me as much as the beauty of the forms,” she explains. The humanism that inspired Ban’s refugee projects also feeds his desire to involve students in the execution of many projects and made a Ban installation especially well-suited for a university gallery. Ban teaches architecture at Keio University in Tokyo and has his students physically execute real-world projects, continuing the tradition of the student volunteers who erected his Kobe housing projects. The installation at Rice University was realized through a dynamic collaboration between first-year undergraduate architecture students from the School of Architecture at Rice and first-year graduate architecture students from the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston, led by their instructors: Nonya Grenader and Danny Samuels from Rice and Donna Kacmar and Bill Price from UH.

The Bamboo Roof installation at Rice University is Ban’s second museum project in the United States. This time, instead of paper, he utilized bamboo, another pro-environmental material. Sections of bamboo flooring were fastened into a flexible, open grid held aloft by clusters of poles. Bamboo is an eminently renewable resource; in reality a grass, it grows at a far quicker rate than wood and is able to be harvested in five years. The floorboards are fabricated from narrow strips cut from the hollow bamboo logs.

Normally the design-to-build process for a project takes two years. For the Rice project the timetable was six months, with the final installation executed over a three-week period. In the end, the project involved more than 50 students, five architects, and two engineers. Grant Suzuki of Shigeru Ban’s studio worked tirelessly with the Houston team during the three-week construction period. Transforming the structure from drawing to reality involved numerous faxes, phone calls, and e-mails between three different time zones: Ban’s office in Tokyo, the structural engineering firm Arup in London, and the Houston team. In moving from drawing to execution, the project entailed problem solving as well as construction as the plan had to be adapted to locally available materials while still holding true to Ban’s aesthetic.

Rice professor Nonya Grenader described the process: “Our initial information from Ban’s Tokyo office was diagrammatic, so we began constructing mock-ups, testing various overlapping patterns, and involving our freshman students so that we could better understand the system. This sort of investigation of a system—testing, examining problems and possibilities—was the real lesson for the students. In executing the work full scale, the students were able to see how a design idea moves from paper to three-dimensional space.” According to Donna Kacmar, the project gave students an “appreciation of how difficult it is to fabricate something” and a first-hand understanding of things like “the weight of steel, the stress realized in the materials, and the physicality of them.”

The process of working together as a group was another invaluable lesson. The project was successful because of the strong cooperation between students and faculty. Kacmar describes the collaboration as an intensely positive and productive experience for all involved. “There was no hierarchy. Everybody was a leader and a follower at different times.”

Shigeru Ban’s visit to the project and presentation of a lecture were the culmination of the installation. But perhaps the final measure of success is that after those epic weeks of hard work, the students are begging for another project.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer