Architects Who Made Small Buildings Remarkable

Ban's small buildings are for people who have just lost theirs. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake he designed Paper Log Houses with cardboard-tube walls on beer-crate foundations, which volunteers could put up quickly; versions followed in Turkey, India and Haiti. His paper-tube partition systems have since given families privacy in evacuation halls from Japan to Ukraine. His Voluntary Architects' Network relies on students and local helpers, and the 2014 Pritzker jury singled out this humanitarian work, which remains the best way into his thinking.

The first building Kéré designed was a primary school for Gando, the village in Burkina Faso where he grew up, finished in 2001 while he was still a student in Berlin. Villagers made the compressed clay bricks and built it with him, and a raised, overhanging metal roof lets hot air escape so the classrooms stay cool without power. Extensions, teachers' housing and a library followed. In 2022 he became the first African architect to win the Pritzker Prize, largely on the strength of these modest community buildings.

The Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in a crowded Dhaka neighbourhood, completed in 2012 on land donated by her grandmother, has no minaret or dome: just a brick enclosure where skylights and perforated walls move pools of light across the prayer hall through the day. It won an Aga Khan Award in 2016. Since then Tabassum has developed Khudi Bari, a cheap bamboo and steel house that families in Bangladesh's flood-prone river lands can take apart and move, and she designed the 2025 Serpentine Pavilion in London.

House NA, finished in Tokyo in 2011 for a young couple, has no conventional rooms at all: a white steel frame holds 21 floor plates at different heights, all glazed, so living is more like climbing around a tree than moving through a house. It is a provocation as much as a home. His 2013 Serpentine Pavilion, a cloud of slender white rods that visitors could sit on and climb, made the same idea public. Since then his practice has grown large, including the timber Grand Ring at Expo 2025 in Osaka.