Shigeru Ban

Centre Pompidou-Metz is dedicating a major exhibition to its architect, Shigeru Ban, who designed the building alongside Jean de Gastines. In an exceptional move, he is curating the exhibition himself, inviting the public to delve into his world and get beyond the forms to discover his thinking, his influences, and his commitment.

Alongside his own creations, the exhibition features works by architects and artists who have influenced his reasoning: Frei Otto, Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, John Hejduk and Alexander Calder among others. This network of influences illuminates the unique nature of his approach — a blend of Western and non-Western traditions, conceptual rigor, and a vision of impermanence — resulting in a hybrid body of work that combines reinterpreted modernism with vernacular craftsmanship.

Beyond the models and completed projects, the exhibition offers a true account of the architectural process. Sketches, diagrams, material experiments, and construction techniques reveal how an idea is transformed into a living space and how cardboard, bamboo, or recycled wood can become architecture. This approach highlights his visual thinking, his intimate relationship with materials, and his constant desire to design architecture that is rational, flexible, and profoundly human. Nicknamed "the architect of emergency," Shigeru Ban has distinguished himself through his interventions in disaster zones around the world. His cardboard tube shelters for refugees and disaster victims embody an approach rooted in structural innovation, environmental awareness, and social responsibility. His projects utilize renewable and locally produced materials that work in harmony with the environment and context. According to Professor Riichi Miyake, a collaborator on this exhibition, his work represents "an architectural equivalent of Doctors Without Borders."

But beyond emergency projects, Shigeru Ban also designs permanent buildings (of which Centre Pompidou-Metz is a striking example) where he revamps the use of ordinary materials (paper, glued laminated timber, polycarbonate and textiles) to reveal their structural and poetic qualities and reexamine the uses and symbols of institutional architecture. He develops "invisible structures," that are integrated into the space rather than exhibited. For him, a wall can become an undulating curtain, a translucent membrane, or a bay window: it is never a rigid boundary and always an articulation.

In this spirit, the exhibition design conceived by Shigeru Ban himself, constitutes a lived experience that favors lightness, transparency, silence, and openness. Cardboard structures, stretched textiles, and modular devices will give form to his architectural language, where light becomes matter.