Shigeru Ban, a Tokyo-born architect with offices in Paris, New York and Tokyo, has won the 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Founded in 1979 by the late Jay Pritzker and his wife, Cindy, and funded by the Hyatt Foundation, the prize honors a living architect whose work demonstrates a combination of talent, vision, and commitment to humanity and the built environment.

The 56-year-old Ban, the seventh Pritzker Prize-winner from Japan since the award was established in 1979, is known for his elegant, innovative work. When the Swiss media company Tamedia asked him to create "pleasant spaces" for its employees, for example, Ban designed a seven-story headquarters with interlocked wooden beams that required no metal joints. Over the course of his distinguished career, Ban, who currently teaches at Kyoto University of Art and Design, also has worked with local citizens, volunteers, and students to design and construct simple, dignified, low-cost, recyclable shelters and community buildings for victims of natural and man-made disasters. His humanitarian work began in response to the 1994 conflict in Rwanda, which left millions of people homeless and displaced. Ban proposed and was hired to design paper-tube shelters for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Following the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, he developed the Paper Log House for Vietnamese refugees in the area out of cardboard tubes. In 1995, he founded a nongovernmental organization called VAN: Voluntary Architects' Network.

"Shigeru Ban is a force of nature, which is entirely appropriate in the light of his voluntary work for the homeless and dispossessed in areas that have been devastated by natural disasters," said Pritzker Prize jury chair Peter Palumbo. "But he also ticks the several boxes for qualification to the Architectural Pantheon — a profound knowledge of his subject with a particular emphasis on cutting-edge materials and technology; total curiosity and commitment; endless innovation; an infallible eye; an acute sensibility — to name but a few."