The jury of the award named him "an exemplary professional" for his work for the benefit of humanity. Shigeru Ban has been involved in helping victims of natural disasters for 20 years, and this activity includes work on the spot and active cooperation with government agencies and public organizations, which gives a much more tangible result than research in the quiet of his workshop. We must not forget about charity: Ban not only designs structures for the areas affected by the disaster, but also finds a way to implement them without attracting local funds - by students and with the financial support of Japanese patrons, as was the case with the concert hall in L'Aquila.
But Shigeru Bana's humanitarian work would not have been as successful if it were not combined with an experimental approach to design. His buildings made of cardboard pipes serving as supporting and enclosing structures are widely known: they are easy and quick to erect, pipes can be simply made water- and fire-resistant, and then, when these temporary structures are no longer needed, they are easy to recycle. And this "sustainability", the maximum possible environmental friendliness and wastelessness is another feature of Ban's work. According to him, he built according to this principle 30 years ago, when the boom of "green" architecture was far ahead.
Ban's portfolio also includes a variety of villas, timber-framed office buildings, the Pompidou-Metz Center and the "Nomadic Museum" made of shipping containers, each of these projects providing a very bold, but quite rational response to the wishes of the customer and the conditions of the context.
Ban is the only Pritzker Prize laureate to date who has implemented a project available for inspection in Russia: this is the pavilion of CSK Garage in Moscow's Gorky Park.
Shigeru Ban is the seventh Japanese architect to receive the Pritzker Prize. Prior to him, Kenzo Tange (1987), Fumihiko Maki (1993), Tadao Ando (1995), Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA) (2010) and Toyo Ito (2013) became laureates.
Shigeru Ban will receive a bronze medal and a cash prize of $ 100,000 for each Pritzker winner at a ceremony on June 13, 2014 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
