The 2014 Pritzker Prize was awarded to Shigeru Ban

The prestigious Pritzker Prize remains in the Land of the Rising Sun for this year as well. After the SANAA studio, which received the award in 2010, their teacher Toyo Ito followed three years later, and this year Shigeru Ban joined the ranks of Japanese architects.
The fifty-six-year-old Tokyo architect received his professional education in America: he studied at SCI-Arc on the West Coast and was a student of John Hejduk at Cooper Union on the East Coast. Upon returning to Japan, he gained his first work experience at the studio of Arata Isozaki. Since the mid-1980s, he has operated his own studio, which almost exclusively works in the field of experimentation. However, commissions come from two different poles. On one hand, his office deals with inexpensive and easily assembled structures for areas affected by natural or humanitarian disasters. The other side of his work includes costly structures of exhibition pavilions (Expo 2000 Hannover), galleries (Centre Pompidou Metz), or administrative buildings (Tamedia Zurich).
The Czech audience may remember his Japanese pavilion for the World Expo 2000 in Hannover, where he collaborated on the vaulted paper structure with engineering legend Frei Otto. Another unforgettable project was a temporary object from Ban's own studio, which was a parasite on the Centre Pompidou in Paris (when he designed the Centre Pompidou in Metz to be as close as possible to the client). Currently, the most attention is drawn to a five-story wooden building in the middle of Zurich, where he did not use a single nail or screw. Ban's work is refreshing, exploratory, and simultaneously has a social impact. Shigeru Ban is a true pioneer in structural and material experimentation, comparable to Buckminster Fuller or Jean Prouvé. We will see how long it takes for another Japanese star, Kengo Kuma, to receive the Pritzker Prize.

More information on the awarding of the Pritzker Prize >