Shigeru Ban   Tokyo / New York / Paris

First exhibition in France for this internationally renowned Japanese architect, who became known in Europe through the Pavilion at Expo 2000.

The general public discovered with astonishment the cardboard-tube structure developed by Ban a few years earlier for emergency housing in Kobe (Japan) and Rwanda, since adopted by the United Nations.

Study models, original drawings, plans and photographs illuminate Shigeru Ban’s singular body of work ; at the center of the exhibition are the project for the Temporary Guggenheim in Tokyo and his first two completed works in France : La Halle du Toueur and the Centre d’Interprétation du Canal de Bourgogne (CICB) in Pouilly-en-Auxois (associate architect Jean de Gastines, Paris).

Other projects on show : the Imai Day Care Center and the gymnasium of Odate Hospital in Odate, the Unichiro Memorial Museum in Iwakuni, the Pavilion at Expo 2000, and the new L‑Unit System furniture system.

It would be a mistake to reduce the architectural and aesthetic quality of Shigeru Ban’s buildings to their unusual material. Without denying its Japanese influence, his work remains rooted in the tradition of New York formalism.

(Original text of 2001, machine translated in 2026.)