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The design for the new modern art museum that opens on Tuesday in the eastern French city of Metz was born of a disarmingly simple idea, architect Shigeru Ban said in a rare interview this week.
"Usually we design the building and we ask the landscape architect to put the trees around. I did it the other way round and asked the landscape architects to design the gardens and I put a Chinese hat on top," Ban explained of the Metz Pompidou Centre.
Ban pointed to a model of the museum in his temporary workshop, which he also designed and which has inhabited the sixth-floor terrace of the original Pompidou Centre in the heart of Paris since autumn 2004.
The Shigeru Ban Architects studio, where a dozen architects have been working with the Japanese master on the Metz project, is in itself a curiosity.
It is enveloped in a white membrane of PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene), just like the Chinese hat of the new museum in Metz.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the wet winters that beset the French capital, its 35- by four-metre structure is composed of paper tubes.
These visibly echo the giant metallic tubes which wrap around the imposing Paris Pompodou Centre and which raised so many eyebrows when the museum was unveiled in 1971 by designer Renzo Piano.
But they also make an interesting architectural point. "Cardboard is a kind of material which becomes very strong with a tube shape," he told AFP.
"Even using weak material we can make strong buildings," said Ban, who erected a paper church in the Japanese city of Kobe following the devastating earthquake there in 1995. The edifice, designed as a temporary structure, remains standing to this day.
Part of the reason why Ban has taken up residence at the top of the Pompidou, with its wonderful views of the Parisian skyline, is the proximity of its director, Bruno Racine, who was on the selection jury for the Metz museum.
"It's very important to be close to your client, to have a close communication," the 49-year-old architect said.
One of the finalists in the 2002 competition for the new World Trade Center in New York, Ban won the competition to design the Metz Pompidou with French architect Jean de Gastines.
The new museum hopes to attract viewers from nearby Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg and provide a new showcase for the Pompidou's vast collection of modern art.
Despite his innovative use of materials, Ban resents being pigeon-holed by the media.
"A lot of journalists always seem to think that I make buildings out of paper," he sighed. "I don't want to be called an architect that makes building out of paper tubes. I make buildings out of any material, as any architect (does)."
"I don't have any prejudice about the material. Anything -- glass, plastic, cardboard -- can be building material."
The Metz project was a case in point, he argued.
"Even the (new) Pompidou Centre is not made with paper tubes but with concrete, steel and wood," he stressed.
Does Ban -- who dreamed as a child of becoming a carpenter and collected waste wood from building sites to build his own constructions -- have an architectural design philosophy?
"Context," he replied. "Context is very important to start design... I look for problems to solve by design."
The Metz building, for example, is not in the city centre so the designers had to find a way to make it a focal point in its own right.
They added three galleries to the building, each facing in a different direction. Two look towards landmarks in the city centre -- the cathedral and the train station -- the third onto a site earmarked for redevelopment.
"Before, the north entrance of the train station was the most important but now, with the Pompidou Centre, the south entrance is going to be very important. Now the city is going to develop further out, so this becomes (an) important plazza," Ban said.
"The design of the galleries came from these conditions," he explained. "If the building was in the middle of the city the design would be totally different".
Ban also believes architecture carries responsibilities.
"It is the responsibility of an architect to build shelter for everyone ... the rich and the poor," stressed the founder of the Volunteer Architects Network, who designed cardboard tubes to temporarily rehouse Rwandan refugees and Kobe earthquake victims.
But he dismisses the notion that he is a "sustainable architect".
"Sustainable development is a fashion. I started using recyclable material long before people started talking about this. The green image is just a commercial image."
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AFPLifestyle-culture-architecture-museum
AFP 051308 GMT 11 06
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