Architect with rubble makes quake-resistant houses

After twin earthquakes in April and May claimed 9,000 lives and left vast swathes of Nepal in ruins, survivors worried if they reused the brick rubble, they would end up with the same vulnerable, seismically unsound structures. 

“Each disaster is different, so I have to go there to find out the particular problems to solve,” said 58-year-old Ban, who built paper emergency shelters in Haiti after the 2010 quake and the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan two years ago. 

The prototype for his latest humanitarian housing project in Nepal consists of standard timber door frames joined together and reinforced with plywood. The frames are filled in with brick rubble, and the roof is covered with a plastic sheet and thatched for insulation. The resulting structure is strong enough to meet Japan’s stringent earthquake standards, he said in an interview at his office in Tokyo. 

“I’m hoping people will copy my design. If we make 20, some other NGO might make more. I’m encouraging people to copy my ideas.

No copyrights,” Ban said, noting he always tries to enlist the help of his houses’ future inhabitants. Ban, who in 2014 won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s top award, said Nepali students in Tokyo and his friends around the world hastened to raise funds for his project. 

Ethnic Madhesi groups, protesting that Nepal’s constitution adopted in September marginalises them, have been blocking trucks from India. The blockade has led to acute shortages of fuel and medicine. 

Ban is used to adapting to harsh local conditions when building for disaster victims, and in this case he had to tweak his original prototype. The fuel shortages led Ban to make trusses from timber, until factories are up and running and cardboard can be procured again.