The Pritzker Prize is like the Oscars of architecture. The jury announced that Japanese architect Shigeru Ban would become 2014's recipient.

According to Architect's Newspaper, which reported the award 30 minutes before the official announcement was made today, Ban will become the next recipient of the Pritzker. He has designed disaster shelters from Kobe to Turkey to Rwanda and he's spent the years since the 2011 Japanese tsunami crisis devoting a huge portion of his practice to designing temporary housing for survivors.



Shigeru Ban's Hannover Pavilion, 2000.

Ban pioneered the use of cardboard as a structural material, which he began building in 1989. His approach involves rolling paper into tubes, bolstering its compressive strength and treating it with chemicals to make columns waterproof.



Centre Pompidou-Metz by Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines. Image: Steve Silverman and Annie Dalbéra,



This is what Ban had to say about winning the prize:
When Martha Thorne [the executive director of the Pritzker] called to tell me, I thought she was joking. I knew about the reason why I was chosen, and I knew that the reason was quite different from other laureates. It was an encouragement for me to continue to do the kind of social work I do as well as making projects like museums and others, so I try to keep a balance between other kinds of projects and working in disaster areas. So I'm taking it as an encouragement rather than the award was for such achievement.