Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has won the 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Ban, 56, is the seventh architect from Japan to receive the honor, which will be officially awarded in June, the Japan Times reported.
For two decades, he has rushed to the site of disasters - for example, the 1995 earthquake in Kobe or the 1994 conflict in Rwanda - to construct temporary relief shelters.
He has often used cardboard paper tubes as building materials, since they are easily found, easily transported and can be water-proofed or fire-proofed.
Ban's relief work has not been limited to creating living shelters. In the wake of the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy, for example, he created a temporary auditorium so the city's musicians could continue to play. And after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, he created partitions for existing emergency shelters so families could have some privacy.
Outside his humanitarian work, Ban's noted projects have included the Centre Pompidou-Metz, a modern art museum in Metz, France, that features a remarkable curved roof made of timber - and inspired by a Chinese hat.
