This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.
Turning Point: Two wildfires in Los Angeles, among the deadliest in the city’s history, destroyed entire neighborhoods and displaced tens of thousands of people.
In January 2025, Los Angeles experienced two of the most devastating wildfires in its history, with the Palisades and Eaton fires burning a combined 37,000 acres and destroying more than 16,000 buildings. Headlines drew attention to razed celebrity mansions and the fires’ daily advance toward beloved cultural institutions. But disasters do not discriminate. The fires also deeply affected areas like Altadena, which are demographically older and lower income than high-profile neighborhoods like Malibu and Pacific Palisades. And communities throughout the region have been struggling to maintain insurance as rates go up or insurers stop offering policies altogether. As the dust settled and abatement began, so did redevelopment tactics that asked long-term residents who had lost everything: Wouldn’t it be easier to just sell the land?
I first learned of this news when an architect from Los Angeles asked me to get involved in the recovery process through my nongovernmental organization, the Voluntary Architects’ Network. In the spring, I visited affected neighborhoods, meeting residents who lost their homes, community volunteers and local government officials. The situation in Altadena felt similar to the aftermaths of the January 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the January 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake, where entire towns burned down in densely built residential areas. The magnitude of the catastrophe struck me, however, when I saw the destruction in more affluent areas with widely spaced houses. Normally, greater spacing between buildings acts as a buffer, slowing a fire’s spread and keeping more homes from harm. This time, it did not. Climate change is intensifying fires and increasing their frequency.
I had begun designing interim housing for displaced families in California even before speaking with local officials or representatives, with the goal of helping residents return to their neighborhoods as fast as safely possible. Volunteers from the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or SCI-Arc — where I was once a student — helped build a prototype of the simple, low-cost structure. The design is based on the 2023 iterations of the Paper Log House built in Turkey after the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, and in Lahaina, Hawaii, after the wildfire there. I am also currently constructing a school whose site was chosen to ensure it serves many of the displaced children in central Maui.
Though it is central to my practice, I find humanitarian work to be disappointingly uncommon among architects. Early in my career, I was focused on learning the profession, but after about 10 years, I concluded that architects are not always very useful to society. Grand monuments and public buildings may inspire awe or demonstrate the power and wealth of the people or governments that commissioned them, but those structures have little impact on most peoples’ lives.
I wasn’t uninterested in creating monumental architecture. But I wondered how I could use my experience and knowledge as an architect for everyday people, particularly to build homes for those who had lost theirs in disasters.
Around that time, in 1994, the genocide in Rwanda had displaced about 2 million people. As I watched coverage of it, I was shocked by the poor conditions of the United Nations refugee camps, where shelters leaked and left cold inhabitants wrapped in blankets. I reached out to the Japanese branch of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and sent a letter to its headquarters in Geneva to propose cardboard tube shelters made of recycled paper. With no reply, I departed for Switzerland without an appointment.
Fortunately, when I arrived, I met Wolfgang Neumann, the U.N.H.C.R.’s senior physical planner. He shared his conundrum: The shelters were first built by refugees cutting down local trees and covering the timber with plastic sheets provided by the agency. The threat of deforestation quickly became a serious problem. The U.N.H.C.R. then supplied aluminum pipes, but the material was so valuable locally that refugees began selling the pipes rather than building with them. My paper tube design was a fortuitous solution, so Mr. Neumann hired me as a consultant. Paper tubes can easily be manufactured locally, reducing transportation costs and environmental impact.
Back home in Japan, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Kobe in 1995, causing a massive fire and more than 6,000 deaths. I immediately went to the site with the goal of helping local Vietnamese refugees, who were enduring worse conditions than the earthquake’s Japanese victims. It was there that I built the first Paper Log Houses, as well as a Paper Church — both constructed from paper tubes.
These early projects spurred requests to build Paper Log Houses around the world, catalyzing the establishment of the Voluntary Architects’ Network. I have led the group’s work for 30 years, supported by my office staff, students from my university laboratory and collaborating professors and students from local universities. Over time, students worldwide have expressed greater interest in both disaster relief work and environmental issues, and volunteer requests have increased. It is encouraging to see young people’s understanding of, and support for, humanitarian causes.
Today, in tandem with our work in Los Angeles, V.A.N. is currently supporting relief efforts for Ukrainian refugees and those injured in the war there. This includes installing the Paper Partition System in gymnasiums to provide privacy and dignity for displaced people and preparing for the war’s aftermath by building a prototype low-cost house in Lviv, Ukraine. I was also asked to design a 25,000-square-meter hospital, and construction of the mass timber building is scheduled to begin in the spring.
Disasters are a moment of reckoning: They expose our values, our vulnerabilities and our capacity to respond. I believe it is a natural extension of our work for architects to help people in disaster areas. It is not special. V.A.N. has undertaken more than 65 relief projects on six continents, providing short- and long-term housing, schools, community centers, places of worship, arts facilities and cultural centers for people displaced by natural disasters and war. This may be some of my most recognized work, but it should not be an anomaly in my profession: We architects have an obligation to use our skills to improve the quality of life for all people.
Shigeru Ban is a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, humanitarian and educator. In addition to founding his practice, Shigeru Ban Architects, in 1985, he is the founder of the Voluntary Architects’ Network, a nongovernmental organization that designs and constructs disaster relief projects around the world.
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