Shigeru Ban’s paper partition system turned a former supermarket into a refugee center in Chełm, Poland.
Photographer: Jerzy ŁątkaHow Architects Are Building Refugee Centers for Ukrainians Fleeing War
Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban’s resourceful technique for creating paper emergency shelters is helping displaced Ukrainians across Europe.
When the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban watched the searing images of Ukrainians fleeing their homes as war arrived at their doorsteps, he recognized a humanitarian crisis he had seen before: Displaced families, many facing their most desperate moments, were packed into hastily constructed refugee centers that offered little in the way of privacy.
“That was exactly the same condition after the earthquake in Japan,” says Ban, in a call from Paris. The March 2011 quake and subsequent tsunami displaced hundreds of thousands of people, who sought temporary shelter in gymnasiums and other public buildings. To help out, the architect developed a partition system using rigid paper tubes — part of a humanitarian mission that has earned the design field’s highest accolades — in order to make ad-hoc facilities more livable for vulnerable families.