Architect Philip Johnson’s former home in New Canaan, Connecticut, has long included a glass house and a brick house. There is also a paper house now.
To be precise, the “Paper Log House” by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Shigeru Ban.
This simple, low-cost structure was designed in 1995 to house victims of the Great Hanshin Earthquake in the city of Kobe, and was opened this week as part of activities to commemorate the Glass House’s 75th anniversary. It will be held until the 15th. Johnson completed his 1949 brick house (also a brick house he completed in 1949, which he plans to reopen on May 2nd after restoration work).
Yes, it’s a small house, with only one room, but it’s made mostly of paper, but it’s sturdier than it looks.
The house, built by Cooper Union students, is the latest version of a shelter designed for Kobe, with a foundation made from milk crates rather than recycled Japanese beer crates filled with sandbags. The walls are vertical paper tubes, like those used for mailing documents or rolling carpets, held in place with foam tape and threaded rods. The roof is made of several paper tubes held together with plywood connectors.
These tubes and their incredible strength have long been a fascination for Mr. Ban. He graduated from New York’s Cooper Union and began his architectural career in Tokyo in 1985. Since then, he has built temporary and permanent paper tube houses, bridges, churches, offices, exhibition pavilions, and even giant buildings that cover the city. I have designed an arch. The Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2000.
And, of course, a large number of emergency structures. His paper tube houses are used in Rwanda, Turkey, India, Haiti, China and New Zealand. More recently, he has been working on running evacuation centers for people who lost their homes in the Maui wildfires and the earthquake on Japan’s Noto Peninsula.
According to Ban, paper tubes are ideal for use in buildings during disasters because they are “lightweight, inexpensive, and available almost anywhere in the world.”
The idea for the current project came last fall when Dean Maltz, Ban’s partner and former classmate, toured the Glass House with the facility’s executive director, Kirsten Reock.
“I said to Kirsten, ‘We have a glass house and a brick house, so wouldn’t it be nice to have a paper house?'” Martz recalled. “And all I could see was a light bulb.”
DIY enthusiasts who have visited with the idea of building a paper tube house in their backyard should know that it’s not as easy as it looks.
The 39 students who built the structure, supervised by Maltz and Cooper Union instructor Samuel Anderson, were able to build it even though they used simple materials and an IKEA-like instruction manual. He was surprised at how difficult it was. Meztri Castro Asmussen, 22, who volunteered on the project, said that in addition to troubleshooting unexpected problems, the students had to use a CNC machine to cut plywood connectors. Ta. Building a paper tube house yourself “requires some skills and tools that may not be accessible in some locations,” he added.
Last month, Martz remembered the property’s late owner as she watched students work.
“Would he accept it in this land? I like to think so,” he mused. “I wish Philip could have come here and seen the paper log house down the hill.”
Living Small is a biweekly column that explores what it takes to live a simpler, more sustainable, and more compact life.
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