Cardboard Cathedral architect Shigeru Ban will next month be awarded the 2026 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Gold Medal at the AIA Conference on Architecture and Design in San Diego, capping more than four decades of work that has proven paper tubes, timber and bamboo can carry permanent civic, cultural and humanitarian architecture.
Ban, already a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, is the first non-American to be awarded the Gold Medal since the late Richard Rogers received it in 2019, and is the first Japanese architect to receive it since Fumihiko Maki in 2011. The award places Ban alongside recent recipients, including Deborah Berke, Carol Ross Barney and Lake Flato co-founders David Lake and Ted Flato, a roster reserved for individuals whose careers have left a lasting influence on theory and practice.
Tokyo-based architect Shigeru Ban (centre) reviews plans with practice colleagues at Shigeru Ban Architects, alongside a layered timber-and-masonry study model. The 2026 Gold Medal jury, chaired by Angela Brooks of Brooks + Scarpa Architects, said Ban’s career masterfully blends structural innovation, ecological sensitivity and profound humanitarianism. (Photo Credit: Shigeru Ban Architects)
Citing what it called Ban’s pioneering use of humble, renewable materials, the AIA said his career “masterfully blends structural innovation, ecological sensitivity, and profound humanitarianism,” with the 2026 jury chaired by Angela Brooks of Brooks + Scarpa Architects. The Gold Medal was first awarded in 1907 and has been presented to more than 80 architects since 1947, including Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei and Renzo Piano.
Born in Tokyo in 1957, Ban opened his Tokyo practice in 1985, after training at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and New York’s Cooper Union, where he studied under Ricardo Scofidio, Bernard Tschumi and John Hejduk. The paper tube began as an exhibition solution while Ban was working as a curator at Tokyo’s Axis Gallery in the mid-1980s, with the lightweight cardboard cylinders supporting his Alvar Aalto retrospective before he scaled them up into permanent civic structures.
After the 1995 Kobe earthquake killed more than 6,000 people, Ban founded the Voluntary Architects’ Network (VAN), the not-for-profit body that has since completed over 50 disaster-relief projects across 23 countries using paper, timber and bamboo. The most recognised work from this body of practice is the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, assembled from 98 cardboard tubes, timber and polycarbonate panels for 700 worshippers after the 2011 earthquake destroyed the city’s Anglican cathedral.
The award follows Wood Central’s reporting on Ban’s CHF 45 million all-timber concert hall inserted within Switzerland’s protected Zeughaus armoury in Altdorf, alongside his ongoing cross-laminated timber expansion of Ukraine’s largest hospital in Lviv. It also caps a year in which Wood Central covered Ban’s bamboo-and-cardboard Blue Ocean Dome at Expo 2025 in Osaka and his mass-timber Kentucky Owl distillery in Bardstown.
Ban’s commercial and cultural portfolio also includes the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, completed in 2010 with a timber gridshell roof inspired by a woven Chinese hat, and the Swatch Omega Campus in Biel, Switzerland, the largest mass timber building in the world at 240 metres of Swiss-sourced wood. Tod Williams, FAIA, co-founder of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, said: “Shigeru is an extraordinary person and of great energy, conviction, and kindness.”
Ban previously won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2014 and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale for Architecture in 2024, with the Japanese government naming him a Person of Cultural Merit earlier this year. For over 30 years, the Tokyo architect has taught at Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia, often involving students directly in VAN humanitarian deployments through workshops that link academic studio work to refugee camps and disaster zones.
