Cardboard as construction material
A church made from cardboard will temporarily replace the Christchurch Cathedral that was heavily damaged when an earthquake struck New Zealand’s Canterbury region last February.
The new structure, designed by Tokyo-based Shigeru Ban Architects, will be capable of serving the church community for at least 10 years, according to the church staff.
The spire and part of the tower of the original Christchurch Cathedral, which dates back to 1864, were destroyed by the 6.3-magnitude earthquake on February 22 last year, leaving only the lower half of the tower standing. Parts of the cathedral were deemed too dangerous for people to enter, and the church authorities agreed to the demolition of unsafe portions of the structure.
The temporary cardboard cathedral will be based around 64 locally produced cardboard tubes, which form an A-frame structure, and a foundation made from shipping containers. Shigeru Ban, who has been creating cardboard structures for more than 20 years, said it is the perfect building material: recyclable, readily available and surprisingly strong.
“The strength of the building has nothing to do with the strength of the material,” Ban said. “Even concrete buildings can be destroyed by earthquakes, but paper buildings cannot.”The firm’s buildings are completely weatherproof and fire-resistant, and have lasted for more than 20 years, cathedral staff said. When the structures’ working lives are over, they can be easily deconstructed and recycled.
Representatives from the city’s Anglican cathedral contacted the Japanese architecture firm last April after seeing its design for a paper church in Kobe, Japan, and the firm has been working with cathedral staff free of charge since May. The Kobe installation, which served as an interim replacement for a church that was destroyed in a 1995 earthquake, was later dismantled and moved to another earthquake-torn community in Taiwan.
