One of the things I am most proud of having done in my life is collaborating with Shigeru Ban to design the Aspen Art Museum. I was recently back in Aspen and the building has held up so beautifully. I am profoundly grateful to everyone who has continued to take such good care of it.
Shigeru’s new book, SHIGERU BAN Architect: Materials · Structures · Disaster Relief, looks across forty years of his architecture and thirty years of his disaster-relief work. The title itself captures so much of what makes his practice extraordinary: his curiosity about materials and structures and his belief that architecture can be useful and serve people in moments of profound need.
The book made me think about the beginning of our project in Aspen. Shigeru was working from a temporary office on top of the Centre Pompidou in Paris when he first presented his design for the new museum to me. The board had asked me to ask him for three versions. Shigeru looked at me and asked, if he made three designs, wasn’t one of them going to be the best? And didn’t I just want that one?
I did.
I have a photograph of Shigeru in that temporary office from that day, and looking at it now, alongside this book and after returning to the museum, I think about the extraordinary journey from an idea presented in Paris to a building in Aspen that people have now been using for more than a decade.
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