This short documentary explores an installation by Shigeru Ban proposing interim housing for Altadena in the wake of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires—among the most devastating in the city's history, burning over 57,000 acres and destroying more than 18,000 buildings. In Altadena alone, the fires consumed approximately 14,000 acres and more than 9,400 structures, including some 4,400 homes.
The film documents Ban's strategy for returning displaced residents to their neighborhoods: a house of low-cost materials fabricated off-site and assembled on-site by predominantly unskilled labor. The entire structure can be erected in a few days, freely adjusted in size, and later disassembled and relocated—a design philosophy in which impermanence becomes a form of resilience.
The installation traces its lineage to the Paper Log House, first built after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, where Ban answered the need for inexpensive shelter that anyone could build—a log-cabin structure with a foundation of sand-filled beer crates, walls of paper tubes, and a roof of tent membranes, designed to be dismantled and recycled. Since then, the Paper Log House has been deployed after disasters in Turkey, India, Maui, Morocco, and Korea, among others. Through Ban and his Voluntary Architects' Network (VAN), the film reveals a career-long commitment to bringing relief and dignity to those in greatest need after nature's disasters.
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