“I hate to throw things away,” explained the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban to a packed audience at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last night. On the projection screen, one of his first works as an architect was displayed: an exhibition of the work of Alvar Aalto, who Ban cited as one of his primary influences. The exhibition was the first time Ban worked with paper tubes, which has become one of his signature strategies. “I couldn’t afford wood like Aalto,” so he turned to the large tubes that had once supported reams of tracing paper. Finding the tubes surprisingly strong, Ban began testing their viability – and the rest has become history.

Throughout the evening’s lecture, Ban spoke with refreshing humility, a quality that often seems lacking among his peers. Many of his most iconic design decisions he attributed to chance, like his use of paper. As Ban worked his way through a retrospective survey of his career, he made frequent quips that enlivened the mood and kept things light, even as he touched on the natural disasters that have been the impetus for many of his most important works. 

For the most part, Ban divided his talk between what could be called his two primary modes of operating: institutional, residential and commercial design for high-end clients; and then housing relief in the aftermath of disasters. At the beginning of the talk, he noted that, since the nascence of his career, he has been troubled by the degree to which architecture remains almost exclusively within the purview of elites. Power and money are invisible, he stated, and often times the work of architects is to render it visible. On the other hand, good architecture could, and should, be deployed to improve even temporary shelters and cheap housing.

While the presentation was largely divided between these two modes, it was clear that Ban deploys similar strategies for any project, taking lessons learned on one site and applying it to another. For example, the flexibility of using shipping containers to create not just interior spaces but also to delineate exterior spaces – something he learned while creating the Nomadic Museum – was later utilized when constructing multi-storied relief housing following the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

Another remarkable quality of Ban’s talk was his decided refusal to assume the stance of the iconoclast. So often in architecture, a practitioner attempts to stake the radicality of their work contra the work of the past. Ban, on the other hand, seems comfortable to work with and around historical precedents. With Curtain Wall House and other projects, Ban described the design as if it was a meeting between the Miesian glass box and traditional Japanese architecture. Rather than seeking to oppose one against the other, Ban combined and intensified both strategies – in the process creating what appeared to be a very effective work of architecture.

Perhaps the most important aspects of Ban’s practice is his dogged pragmatism. He noted that temporary does not necessarily imply environmentally-sustainable – in fact, quite the opposite. For the Japanese Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover, a collaboration with the recently-deceased Frei Otto, Ban ensured that all materials would be recycled. When working on a housing project for Vietnamese refugees in Kōban, Japan, Ban stumbled upon the use of plastic crates as a building foundation, which he was able to source from the Kirin Brewery Company. “I was very disappointed when the crates arrived,” he stated, deadpan. “They were empty.”

The evening was chock full with great anecdotes, such as when a stern Swiss client insisted the project wasn’t complete until he reproduced a giraffe sculpture originally meant to show the scale of a space. While working on the Pompidou Metz, Ban built a temporary office on the top of the Pompidou because he “wasn’t able to afford the rent in Paris.” If friends visited, they’d have to buy a ticket to the museum. 

Ban ended the talk by discussing the paper and wood cathedral he recently built in Christchurch following a devastating earthquake. He noted that the building has become a tourist destination in its own right, even though it was constructed to be temporary. In fact, many other of his projects have become so beloved by those who use them, that they are maintained for years. Ban noted that, on the other hand, a concrete structure sometimes has an even shorter life-span than one of his paper shelters, quickly becoming victim to a disaster or to a developer. “There’s no difference to me anymore between a temporary building and a monument,” he concluded.