Houses made of paper and beer crates for Turkey earthquake refugees

The earthquake of last February in Turkey and Syria already adds more than 50,000 deaths. And thousands of missing. And more than a million homeless people. The bulk of them are in temporary camps for displaced persons.

Still…

A drama.

Shigeru Ban (Tokyo, 1957), one of the greats of architecture in the world, Pritzker Prize –the Nobel Prize for the profession– a decade ago and Princess of Asturias Award for Concord a year ago for relieving many of the original designs with disasters of the last decades, take back the reins.

The foundation of your solution? Build from beer crates and paper craft.

He explains it this way to La Vanguardia:

“The foundations are made up of beer crates filled with sandbags. And wooden panels are used to build the walls between the columns of paper tubes: this allows construction in a short time. The roof is made of frames of paper tubes and plywood boards, and large holes are also drilled in them to ensure safety during construction and that you can work from them instead of having to climb on the roof. Due to the cold climate, adequate insulation will be added to the floor, walls and roof. All in 3.6 meters by six”.

The prototype has already been assembled and tested in Tokyo and now it’s time to go to Turkey.

And it is that his urgent alternative for the thousands of people who have been left homeless in the Turkish-Syrian border area is launched once again, highlighting the work of the UN. It is also the reason why “in this month or the next” he plans to move there. He wants to see on the ground the feasibility of the plan.

In a low, calm, even monotonous voice, uttering short sentences as he looks up as he speaks, he reflectively points out how, otherwise, this disaster “is the same as others I’ve seen. It’s not just Türkiye. It was also the same after the Sichuan earthquake in China in 2008. The main problem is the quality of the construction of the buildings, since they do not respect building regulations”.

– Is some international control needed on how to build with the minimum quality, seen what has been seen?, he is questioned.

-“It is not necessary because each one has its own regulation, policy and needs. You don’t need a standard,” he says.

Faced with this, Ban, from Paris, adds: “There are many different ways to help, there is no best one. The locally available material is different, the climate is different, and the solution has to depend on the locally available materials and the local climate.”

In this case, in fact, it looks back to the response already given when the 1999 earthquake in northwestern Turkey, which was solved by building temporary houses with paper tubes. Now it is time – it is detailed from his Tokyo studio – “an improved version of that one” more efficient that minimizes construction times in situ.

“Did you go to Turkey or Syria?” Cut however Ban to this journalist. The negative answer therefore leads him to add: “You have to go there. Without being there you cannot understand the situation. Because it’s hard…”

-Is it even worse than we can imagine?, he is answered.

– “Maybe it’s better than you think. You have to experience it yourself,” adds the award-winning Japanese architect.

-Is the catastrophe in Turkey a new lesson for everyone, for rich or poor, for the West or the East, North or South, about how we build and how we maintain buildings, etc.?

Ban does not hesitate for a second: “Everyone wants construction to be as cheap and as fast as possible. Even in buildings for rich people it is the same. Anywhere. It is not about rich or poor. It is about respecting the regulations ”, he emphasizes.

Contrary cases, in fact, abound. There is the disaster of the collapse of a viaduct in Genoa, Italy, in 2018, and with 43 deaths, as a close warning.