Cardboard city.

In the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake, a Japanese architect has adapted the technology of paper architecture to help refugees ad other victims of disasters.

Shigeru Ban's experiments with paper architecture conducted over the last 10 years or so have encompassed exhibition stands, a house for himself and a gallery of exquisite simplicity in Tokyo (AR August 1995). Most recently he has made his paper architecture serve the needs of refugees and victims of disasters, providing housing and a church for the victims of the January 1995 Kobe earthquake. This wreaked devastation in one of the poorest parts of the city and caused the destruction of the old wooden shops and houses as well the Takatori Catholic Church. The church has sustained a congregation of Vietnamese and Korean immigrants and impoverished Japanese, and became in ruin a poignant symbol of sanctuary. Visiting Kobe two weeks after the earthquake, Ban was struck by the sight of people praying and freezing rain among the ashes of the church, sheltered only by flimsy umbrellas.

Eight months after the disaster, with donations and with the help of student volunteers, Ban had built a new church. Like the Tokyo gallery, the structure consists of a rectangular shed, measuring about 170 sq m, on a concrete base and supported internally by paper tubes, 5 m in height. Tube walls were built up from laminated layers of recycled paper to a thickness of 16 mm and wooden stoppers inserted at a both ends. The result is a strong structural column, capable of supporting about half the weight supported by a column of wood. But whereas the gallery was enclosed by steel-framed glass, the church has walls of clear plastic louvres and a tented roof of white teflon-coated fabric. The building, which is a community hall as well as a church, took five weeks to erect. Today, filled with light diffused through the transparent walls and white roof, it is a numinous place in which to worship, and to the survivors it is a symbol of renewal.

Ban used the same technology, and some of the same volunteers, to build 21 new houses for earthquake evacuees. To raise money for the project and to show what could be done, Ban had built a prototype house out of paper tubes, Teflon-coated tenting and plastic beer crates -- to raise the structure off the damp ground. In six hours he had assembled a satisfactory house for four people that could be heated by the same kind of small portable heater that is used in traditional Japanese dwellings. The tubes are sealed and made waterproof by hand, though the process has to be repeated every year.

Two hundred more shelters are being built for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, for Sudanese in Nairobi; and Ban is working with the architecture school at the University of Nairobi on the development of semi-permanent housing for refugees, combining paper tube construction with traditional mud walls.