March 28 Tip: Learn about prize-winning architect designing for refugees and evacuees

FROM NPR: Learn about prize-winning architect designing for refugees and evacuees

(The March 28 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/24/292420643/pritzker-winner-shigeru-ban-designs-solutions-in-the-face-of-disaster?sc=17&f=1008

Each year the Pritzker Architecture Prize goes to a star architect with a long list of glamorous commissions around the globe. This year's winner is a little different.

Shigeru Ban has designed museums, homes and concert halls. But Ban is best known for a more humble kind of work: The temporary structures he's built for refugees and evacuees all over the world.

Ban may be the only architect in the world who makes buildings out of paper — cardboard paper tubes, to be precise.

"It's very inexpensive. It's made of recycled paper," he says. "We can make any length, any diameter, any thickness."

Ban actually tested the strength of cardboard tubes, and says he was surprised by what he discovered. He's used them to build temporary housing for disaster victims in Japan, Haiti, China and elsewhere. Picture a log cabin — except the tubes are arranged vertically instead of horizontally. Ban says paper tubes are cheap and plentiful. And unlike costs for traditional building materials, the price of paper tubes doesn't jump after an earthquake or flood.