You want a glitzy new cultural centre in Backofbeyondistan? Don’t call Shigeru Ban

Shigeru Ban is the celebrated architect who refuses to become a celebrity. Thus, at 57, his career has run opposite to the dominant trend in the profession. For a generation there has been a star system in architecture, as tacky and ludicrous and overblown as the Hollywood original. Ban, softly spoken but strictly principled, is outside it.

New money — gas- and mineral-rich individuals and, indeed, whole nations — seeks prestige through stand-out buildings. The stage army of celebrity architects who once made their reputations through ingenious design have become willing collaborators in a vulgar conspiracy. Instead of selling ingenuity, or humbling themselves with notions of public utility, the starchitects have been doing slick promotional selfies as premium brands. You want a glitzy new cultural centre in Backofbeyondistan? Call Zaha! Call Rem! Send your jet! They can pack their Prada overnight bag in minutes.

But there is a reaction. Item 1. Even Koolhaas, a supernova in the star system who once enthused about creating identical mega-cities, says we now need to concentrate more on architecture than on architects.  This is rather like Karl Kraus’s observation that Freud was the disease he purported to cure. Item 2. Next month Shigeru Ban will receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize at a ceremony in Amsterdam’s newly refurbished Rijksmuseum. His popular obscurity will be over. But who is he?

Ban was educated in Tokyo, California and at New York’s Cooper Union, where a presiding spirit was Victor Papanek, author of Design for the Real World (1971), a book that argued for creative recycling. At the time, Papanek seemed to be merely a contrarian opponent of imperial industrial America and its religion of waste, but now his arguments for reuse appear visionary. They have been reused, or resurfaced, in Shigeru Ban.