That was May 2011.
Ban has a history of responding to the need for post-disaster shelter in Turkey, China , India, Italy and Japan.
He replied immediately, waiving any fee, and visited Christchurch two weeks later, instigating the construction of the first new public building in the city after the February 2011 quake.
University of Auckland School of Architecture professor Barrie Andrew, who has a special interest in Japanese architecture, has written the story of the Cardboard Cathedral, a lighthouse showing how our cities could be built.
As Andrew says, the destruction of central Christchurch and the Gilbert Scott cathedral (itself originally envisaged as wooden) may signal an end to Englishness in our most English city.
It is one year since the Cardboard Cathedral opened in Christchurch, across the road from the collapsed CTV building in which 115 people died, among them 28 foreign language students, many of them Japanese.
Last November, I attended the first wedding held in the new church, the citizens of a place once built of stone and brick reclaiming its shifting ground. Ban introduces himself as an architect concerned with the dispossessed, as well as the more usual elite clients.
He uses unusual techniques, in this case cardboard tubes. He has elsewhere built large-scale halls of stacked shipping containers.
It is popular, unpretentious and practical architecture, lightweight and easily dismantled. Such is the Pacific way.
Our pursuit of the security of permanence is frequently undermined, and possibly increasingly so.
There is a need for flexibility in the way our cities are viewed.
This attractively plain book has many brown-paper pages of photographs of the church being assembled.
The text outlines the politics of deciding the site, the references to the broken church in the design of the coloured window, the compromises on the dimensions of the locally obtainable cardboard tubes, the effects of heavy rain during construction and the co-operation with local engineers and architects, and its paper tube pulpit and altar and plywood seating.
There is a section of concepts and drawings.
''Shigeru Ban is the biggest name in international architecture to work in New Zealand for a generation, arguably ever, and the Cardboard Cathedral will likely be established as one of the most architecturally significant buildings in the country,'' Barrie writes.
And, as Ban himself commented at its opening, ''if people love a building that is made of paper, it can be permanent'', though all things are transient.
Poignantly, the foreword is written by the Very Rev Lynda Patterson, Dean of Christchurch, who died in July at the age of 40.
• Peter Goodwin is an ODT subeditor.
