The next time you’re tossing out those old cardboard mailing tubes or the cores of wrapping paper rolls, think of this: you could have made them into a house for an earthquake victim. Well, probably not you, but Japanese architect Shigeru Ban could have. He’s built a career creating incredible structures out of recycled paper.
He’d tested the construction technique in 1994 Rwanda, where genocidal civil wars had left much of the population homeless. “The United Nations gave them only a plastic sheet, four by six meters,” said Ban. To create the frames, “the refugees had to cut up trees by themselves. Over two million people became refugees in Rwanda. They cut down all the trees. So the United Nations provided aluminum pipe to stop the cutting of trees. But in Africa, aluminum is a valuable material. So refugees sold all the aluminum for money, then they cut the trees again.” Ban showed the refugees how to assemble the simple paper-tube-based shelters, a process he repeated after earthquakes in Turkey in 1999 and India in 2001. His Paper Church, created for Kobe Catholics as a temporary shelter after the earthquake, with a classical peristyle made of recycled paper tubes, is still in use today.
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It’s the kind of monument Ban wants to keep building, and he’s able to do so because he’s become a master at bridging the two worlds of architecture–high and low–and making the one pay for the other. He’s translated his paper-construction technology into such upscale projects as a showroom for fashion designer Issey Miyake and an enormous pavilion for Japan at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany. He was among the architects on the THINK team, whose latticework towers almost beat out Daniel Libeskind’s design for the World Trade Center site. His Picture Window House, which draws on the legacy of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in creating unobstructed, free-flowing space, was named by Architectural Record as one of its best houses in 2003.
Ban left it to Chicago architectural icon Stanley Tigerman to announce the winners among the 12 finalists, and from his remarks it appeared that the jury was less interested in the problem of garage design itself than in the site’s other possibilities. “We felt, generally, that if submissions didn’t…use [the site] as a bridge, it would be a missed opportunity. So those that didn’t do that were quickly eliminated,” Tigerman told the crowd. “Land is valuable in Chicago, and to use valuable land for parking, we all quickly agreed, was not the world’s greatest idea.” The jury favored proposals that provided parkland on the surface crossing the expressway.
The other first-place winner, Filter Park, from New York’s Leven Betts Studio, was the only prizewinner that addressed the problem of the parking garage from a design perspective. It placed the garage over and perpendicular to the expressway: two thin linear structures of automated parking, 130 feet tall, with a “filtering urban garden” between them that would include a crossing for pedestrians and bicycles. Tigerman said what drew the jury to the design was that “they did a kind of Chicago building…very transparent. You saw the car in side elevation”–meaning that coming down the expressway it would be apparent from quite a distance that this was a parking lot, and as you drew closer you’d actually be able to see how many open spaces were left.
There are good garages in Chicago, but they’re in the distinct minority. Ralph Johnson’s striking new mixed-use high-rise development Skybridge, at Madison and the Kennedy, offers one of the few new garages that don’t resemble an open sore, with a sleek concrete facade along the expressway and a handsome window wall on Halsted mixing three different shades of green glass.
