The residents of Shigeru Ban’s Container Temporary Housing in Onagawa used to call themselves the unluckiest people in town. For starters, the Miyagi Prefecture town of 10,000 was all but destroyed on March 11, when 3,800 of its 4,500 houses sustained significant damage or were demolished outright. Then they lost the lottery for temporary housing, leaving them no choice but to remain even longer in the town’s gymnasium-turned-evacuation-center. But after moving into Ban’s buildings, finished in November, this crowd feels it is the luckiest.
Though the end product proved to be worth the wait, Ban’s housing seemed to be a long time coming. “Any bureaucrat in any country is very careful and doesn’t want to take the risk of doing something new,” explains the Japanese architect. Building with shipping containers was uncharted territory for prefectural government officials, but it was Ban’s proposal for multistory structures that was the real sticking point. It took months to convince the authorities to deviate from their standard-issue, single-story solutions.
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