Ray Kappe & Shigeru Ban will be in conversation tonight at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, @ 7pm. More info
Co-presented with WIRED
Ray Kappe, much awarded and published Architect / Educator founded SCI-ARC in 1972, and is renowned for his residential architecture, characterized as the "apotheosis of the California Modern House." Since 2004, he has been working on his innovative, much acclaimed and published modular steel-framed prefabricated houses.
Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who studied with Ray Kappe at SCI-Arc, is known for his pioneering use of low-cost building materials such as paper and bamboo. As a consultant for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in the early and mid-1990s, Ban created emergency housing from paper tubes for victims of the Rwandan civil war - designs that were redeployed for victims of the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan.
12 Comments
i was going and i stillt hink i am.
nice. Ask Shigeru about the Rwanda project and why it was never adopted and was deemed a failure. (great story by the UNHCR on the problems of paper tube refugee tents)
do you have a link to that story? i couldn't find it unhcr.
told to me by MacKay Wolff (UNICEF/UNHCR) after interviews about the Rwanda project.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2003/12/11/segments/24027
we ended up not putting it all in the book.
i didn't find any reference in that link to what you are saying.
am i supposed to find it in hours worth of archives so i can direct a question to ban about fuckin' paper tube?
you should put in your book. thanks!
sorry. Gotta pull out my research files. it's in the storage (we move next week to SF).
The short story is that the UN decided not to use Ban's design (although innovative) as in order to produce the number needed you'd have to shut down the only paper production facility in Rwanda.
They commissioned 50 for a trial and eventually scrapped the plan for a full roll out (bad pun).
The Turkey, India and Kobe ones worked very well.
aha.
thank you.
this was talked about in the 30 minute program in above link, some of the repeated mistakes in aid efforts are that, aiding party don't know how to empower the aided side or applicability of the ideas or means of production of the aid in the particular locality.
including the cultural and religious material. very complex. i hope these issues are addressed in the 'competitions' clearly.
yeah. that's the main reason we don't just replicate the design concept in the field and 'hire' the winning team to develop the scheme into a realizable set of construction documents.
I'm writing a piece for A+U on this precise issue.
i look forward to read it. please let us know when it comes out.
well, nobody asked about that project and they allowed only three questions anyway.
and, shigeru told his story about how he really wanted to go to cooper union, but as they didn't accept foreign students, he could only go as a transfer student, so he went to sciarc in order to be able to transfer to cooper union.
where he latter suffered from eisenman's attempts to brainwash him, and who would call him SugarBear instead of Shigeru.
the story reminded me of the fact that sciarc indeed gave some students a chance to try architecture whom most other schools wouldn't have even considered - shigeru came here right after high school and he spoke no english, but his portfolio was enough to convince Kappe to put him in the second year.
i didn't know the whole event was based around ray turning to be 80 y.o.
beautiful projects by both and ben's appreciation of ray and sci arc was very touching and familiar to me. shigaru and i have increadibly similar stories about starting up at sci arc. we were there around the same time and remember him from the distance.
i was also started from second year based on my community college drawings.
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