At the former estate of architect Philip Johnson in New Canaan, Conn., there has long been one Glass House and a brick house. Now there is also a Paper House.
Pritzker-winning Japanese architect Shigeru Ban’s Paper Log House, to be exact.
An exhibition of this simple, low-cost structure—designed in 1995 to house victims of the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe, Japan—opens this week and will run through Dec. 15 as part of Glass’s 75th anniversary activities Body. which Johnson completed in 1949. (The Brick House, also completed in 1949, is scheduled to reopen after restoration work on May 2.)
It’s a small house, sure — just one room — and it’s made mostly of paper, but it’s more durable than it looks.
The house, assembled by Cooper Union students, is an updated version of the shelter designed for Kobe: The base is made from milk crates rather than reclaimed Japanese beer crates filled with sandbags. The walls are vertical paper tubes—like those used for mailing documents or carpet wrapping—held together with foam tape and threaded rods. the roof is made of more paper tubes attached with plywood joints.
These pipes and their amazing power have been a long-standing fascination for Mr. Ban. Since graduating from Cooper Union in New York and beginning his architecture practice in Tokyo in 1985, he has designed paper houses, bridges, churches, offices and exhibition stands, both temporary and permanent, as well as a huge arch that covered the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 2000.
And, of course, lots of emergency construction: His paper tube houses have been used in Rwanda, Turkey, India, Haiti, China and New Zealand. Most recently, he worked in shelters for those who lost their homes in the Maui fires and the earthquakes in Japan’s southern peninsula.
The paper tube, Mr Ban said, is ideal for construction in disaster situations because “it is light, cheap and available almost anywhere in the world”.
The idea for the current project was born last fall when Mr. Ban’s partner and former classmate Dean Maltz took him to the Glass House for a tour with the property’s executive director, Kirsten Reoch.
“I said to Kirsten, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice, with the Glass House and the Brick House, to have a paper house?’ Mr Maltz recalls. “And I could only see lamps.”
DIYers visiting with the idea of building their own backyard paper tube houses should know that it’s not as easy as it seems.
The 39 students who assembled the structure, supervised by Mr. Maltz and Cooper Union instructor Samuel Anderson, were surprised at how difficult it was — even with simple materials and an Ikea-like instruction manual. Meztli Castro Asmussen, 22, who volunteered for the project, said the students had to use a CNC machine to cut the plywood joints, in addition to dealing with unexpected problems. Building your own house out of paper tubes, he added, “will require some technology and tools that may not be accessible depending on where you are.”
Last month, as Mr. Maltz watched the students work, his thoughts turned to the property’s late owner.
“Would he accept that on this property? I like to think so,” she mused. “I wish Philip was here to look up the hill and see a paper log house.”
Living Small is a bi-weekly column that explores what it takes to live a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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