Ban Builds At Moma

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2000 by Paula Deitz

Paula Deitz remembers Shigeru Ban's Paper Arch, an exhibition at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

'The problem with representing architecture in museum galleries is that nothing less than a full-scale structure conveys the complete sense of an architect's achievement,' commented Matilda McQuaid, associate curator of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Architecture and Design. MoMA found a solution to this problem back in the 1940s and '50s: the museum inaugurated a series of exhibitions that consisted of constructing temporary actual-size houses and other innovative structures outside in its garden to explore new ideas and technologies.

Houses by Marcel Breuer and Gregory Ain demonstrated how suburban America could achieve economy of space with elegance of form, and a traditional Japanese house designed by Junzo Yoshimura showed how aspects of contemporary architecture -- curtain walls and open interiors -- had been formulated in Japan 300 years earlier.

For Making Choices, MoMA's recent all-museum survey celebrating modern art in the years between 1920 and 1960, the architecture department sought a new temporary structure for what is now the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, as a reprise of the popular concept. 'This time we selected material as the basic design theme,' said McQuaid. When it comes to revolutionizing building materials, the architect of this and many moments to come is Shigeru Ban, who has adapted paper tubing or 'evolved wood' (his term) as a construction material because of its cost-effectiveness and recyclability. The quick-fix paper log houses he built for earthquake victims in Kobe and refugees abroad are well known. Through sophisticated engineering, he has extended the uses of cardboard tubes to include more complex structures such as a railway station and community church in Japan and the Japanese Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover.

Though he lives in Japan, as a 1985 Cooper Union graduate, Shigeru Ban is no stranger to New York and understands the special role of MoMA's sculpture garden as an oasis in the city, where afternoon visitors loll in Bertoia chairs among the sculptures and the groves of silver birch. His 30ft-high latticed paper-tube arch [*] that soared over the garden this past spring and summer appeared, after all these years, to complete Philip Johnson's 1955 garden design, creating a sense of enclosure and sanctuary without losing the drama of openness to neighbouring towers or the sky above.

Japanese architecture has traditionally been integrated with garden landscapes. Ban himself pays tribute to the association at the pavilion in Hanover (p58). Although MoMA's Paper Arch -- both waterproofed and fireproofed -- spanned the entire 87ft-width of the garden, weighed nine tonnes and was tethered to welded plates on the museum facade by steel cables under tension, the segmented arches of rolled, 32-ply brown paper tubing appeared to possess the lightness of a weathered bamboo trellis in an old Japanese garden. Sitting under the veil of its crisscrossed shadows, New Yorkers were enchanted by this grand gesture for their summer pleasure occupying the garden for the few remaining months before it was to close for the museum's major architectural renovation by Yoshio Taniguchi. The Paper Arch will remain in the memory; the garden will never seem the same without it.

(*.) Designed with engineers Buro Happold.