Shigeru Ban: Is a Home Still a Home When It Is Temporary?

A photograph of a hall turned into a shelter opens this imagined meeting with Shigeru Ban: mattresses side by side, bags beside people's heads, hanging clothes trying to make a wall, and a woman turning away to change her child's clothes under a roof that came with no door. The architect narrator places the picture before Ban and says these people need homes, and Ban answers by asking what can be done for them tonight. Their conversation moves through partitions between families and how to secure them, emergency exits and ventilation, the word temporary when nobody knows how long people will stay, storage for the things they managed to save, and what to ask the families about the hardest part of their day. When the narrator speaks of beauty and hope, Ban keeps asking what the design will do, and tells him to return after people have used it to see where they hung another curtain and which passage they avoided. Left alone with the photograph, the narrator draws a space for a family with its entrance, its belongings and its exit route, and writes beside it a question about a mother who should be able to care for her child without turning her back on the world.