The Paper Dome was never just a church. From its first day in Kobe on September 17, 1995, it served as community center, meeting hall, and emotional anchor for a neighborhood in shock. Ban shaped 58 cardboard tubes into an elliptical frame, each tube 33 centimeters in diameter and about 1.5 centimeters thick. Despite weighing only 60 kilograms apiece, each tube can support up to 1,500 kilograms. The taller pillars bear loads of up to 6,900 kilograms. The entire structure rises 5 meters high, light enough to feel temporary but sturdy enough to shelter a congregation for a decade. Nicknamed the Paper Dome almost immediately, it became the spiritual and social heart of its corner of Kobe.

By 2005, the Kobe congregation had outgrown its paper walls and planned a permanent replacement. The dome was slated for demolition. Then the president of Taiwan's New Homeland Foundation visited Kobe and proposed a different ending: donate the structure to Taomi Village in Nantou County, Taiwan, a community still recovering from its own catastrophe. The 1999 Jiji earthquake, known in Taiwan as the 921 earthquake, had destroyed 168 of the village's 369 homes and killed 20 residents. On May 29, 2005, the last service was held inside the Paper Dome in Kobe, and the building was carefully dismantled and shipped to Taiwan. Three years of paperwork and preparation followed before Taomi was ready.

On May 25, 2008, more than 1,000 people gathered in Taomi Village to reassemble the Paper Dome. Each cardboard tube had been recoated with a water-resistant finish produced locally in Puli Township. The dome opened to visitors the very next day, nine years to the season after the earthquake that had shattered the village. On September 21, 2008, delegates from both Christian and Daoist traditions blessed the land beneath it. The Paper Dome had become something it never was in Kobe: a monument, not to disaster, but to the stubborn human reflex to help strangers rebuild. It now stands as the centerpiece of Taomi's ecological village, drawing tourists who come for the frogs and fireflies and stay to marvel at a building made of paper that outlasted concrete.

Shigeru Ban built his career on the conviction that architecture should serve people who need it most. Before the Paper Dome, he had designed paper-tube shelters for refugees, discovering that cardboard insulated better than the cheap plastic sheeting aid agencies typically provided. He took no fee for the Kobe project. His approach was radically practical: paper tubes are inexpensive, lightweight, easy to transport, and surprisingly strong. The Paper Dome proved that a building designed to be disposable could acquire meaning no permanent structure could match. Ban went on to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2014, but the Paper Dome remains one of his most poignant works, a structure whose second life in Taiwan validated every principle he built his practice on.