The house for Kundan's mother, dubbed Chameli, is constructed of two 40 x 8 containers located next to the family's garden.

The New York Times architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, interviewed 2014 Pritzker Prize winner Shigeru Ban for the 2014 New York Times Cities for Tomorrow conference. Via The New York Times

The Tinbeerwah house and studio keep a low profile among the site’s eucalyptus trees.

There are bookshelves, closets, and cabinets galore in the pared-down, boxy home.

A Tab F1 floor lamp from Flos stands behind the Edward Wormley–designed Dunbar sofa.

Lightroom 1.0, a photography studio, is a freestanding structure on the property. “Together, they represent an autobiography of my career,” Carpenter says.

Load-bearing elements are clustered together in the form of storage instead of a typical post-and-beam format.

The Japanese brand Muji will begin selling his kit house in 2014, which is prefabricated using furniture (i.e. storage units) as load-bearing modules. House of Furniture’s exterior looks more like a pavilion than a box.

Both the sitting and standing versions of DESK 01, a collaboration between Artifox and IdeaPaint, are outfitted with dry erase surfaces for recording sudden bursts of creativity.

Shigeru Ban, Cardboard Cathedral A testament to the strength, skill, and poignancy of the Pritzker winner’s “emergency architecture,” this A-frame marvel of cardboard tubing and shipping containers served as a potent symbol for Christchurch’s recovery after an earthquake. In another symbolic touch, the stained glass triangle at the front of the church incorporates imagery from the former cathedral’s famous rose window.

The interior is a spatially open layout with a flexible DIY storage system that supports the ceiling.

Style: "#1"

Site work in progress.

Storage units like this one stand in as walls and structural support—no posts or beams needed.

While the original home was dark, like other homes of its period, the addition allowed Andrews and his team to let in an abundance of natural light.

The proportions and floorplan mimic those of the prior landmark, though the new, temporary structure is built of paper tube modules.

The façade of the interwar dwelling was painted bright white and left largely unchanged, with a sole burst of color coming from a yellow DesignByThem “tomtom” letterbox. Though the extension is invisible from the street, architect Christopher Polly says it provides “significant additional freedom for the owners and their three young children to grow into.”

Photos By Rob Turner Photography

Future site view. Overgrown 21+ acre forested site.

In 2013, Ban’s office introduced its new disaster housing prototype, the New Temporary House, whose exterior is made of insulated sandwich panels and fiber-reinforced plastic.

As part of the House Vision exhibition, organized by Muji art director Kenya Hara in 2013, architect Shigeru Ban was tasked with designing a housing prototype that relies on furniture to provide structure.

Collage of site photos overlaid on top of previous owner's site plan. Site was unoccupied when purchased.

OPA wanted to free themselves from logic imposed by a grid and considered various inefficient configurations of shipping containers. They settled on a combination of options, seen in the trikselion shape here. The Presidio, San Francisco, California. Mobile exhibition pavilion for the For-Site Foundation. © Tim Griffith.

After the 6.3-magnitude earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, in February of 2011, Ban was asked to design a replacement cathedral for the city.

site design group, ltd. The award-winning landscape firm behind sites such as Mary Bartelme Park took over the penthouse of the historic Crane Company Building, designed by Holabird & Roche in 1912, and turned it into a playful, open workspace.