A day after his death, German architect Frei Otto was named the 2015 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field's highest honor. The award typically goes to a living architect. Otto died on 9 March at age 89, so the announcement of the prize, scheduled for March 23, was hastily moved up. The executive director of the prize, Martha Thorne, a former architecture curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, told Otto of the award before he died. Mr. Otto's work grew out of a time of scarcity after World War II, when a shortage of construction materials encouraged him to innovate. One inspiration, he said, was the soap bubble, which showed him how to create the maximum enclosure with the minimum material. Without Frei Otto, many of the structures and buildings of the past 50 years wouldn't exist. Because Otto wasn't just an architect-he was also a brilliant inventor and engineer who pioneered some of the most far-fetched feats of structural engineering ever completed. "Throughout his life," said the citation from the nine-member Pritzker jury, "Frei Otto has produced imaginative, fresh, unprecedented spaces and constructions." Otto's major buildings include the German pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, roof for Olympic Stadium, Munich in 1972, Tuwaiq Palace, Saudi Arabia, with Buro Happold in 1985 and the Japan Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany. The award comes with US$ 100,000 and a bronze medallion. It will be presented, presumably to representatives of the architect, on May 15 in Miami Beach. Founded in 1979 by Jay A. Pritzker and his wife Cindy, the award is funded by the Pritzker family and is considered to be one of the world's premier architecture prizes; it is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture. The Pritzker Prize won such architectures, as Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Oscar Niemeyer, Wang Shu, Toyo Ito . Otto is the second German architect to win the award. The first was Gottfried Boehm, the 1986 winner.

Paper and cardbo's toolbox for drawings and models of buildings, but for Japanese architect Shigeru Ban they are good enough to make the real thing. The 56-year-old, who has built a reputation over the past 30 years for crafting improbable structures around the world - from housing to art galleries and cathedrals - many from humble cardboard tubes, has been named as the winner of the 2014 Pritzker prize, the highest accolade in the industry. "When you finish a roll of tracing paper or fax paper, there are always paper tubes left over," he said. "They were so strong and so nice, so I kept them. Then I went to the factory where they made them, and I saw they could make any length and any diameter." Beginning with temporary exhibition designs, his experiments with cardboard engineering soon expanded in scope, from undulating grid-shell pavilions to the geodesic frame of his temporary office in Paris. Strapped limpet-like to the roof of the Pompidou Centre, this cardboard-framed tunnel was his base for designing the gallery's outpost in Metz, completed in 2010, itself conceived as a rippling rattan hat of bamboo and oiled paper. But it is for his humanitarian work, as much as for his houses and museums, that Ban caught the Pritzker jury's eye. "He is a force of nature," said the jury chairman, Lord Palumbo, "which is entirely appropriate in the light of his voluntary work for the homeless and dispossessed in areas devastated by natural disasters." In 1994, prompted by the displacement of millions by the Rwandan civil war, Ban proposed paper-tube shelters to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, followed a year later by paper log cabins after the Kobe earthquake, with foundations made of sand-filled beer crates and walls of vertical cardboard tubes. After founding the Voluntary Architects' Network in 1995, he has tackled disaster relief in Turkey, India, China and Haiti, most recently erecting a magnificent cardboard cathedral after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand , rising in an elegant A-frame next to the ruins of George Gilbert Scott's stone building. Outside Ban's humanitarian work, his projects include the Centre Pompidou-Metz, a modern art museum in France featuring a curved roof made of timber which is inspired by a Chinese hat. He also designed Swiss media firm Tamedia's seven-store headquarters, built with an interlocking wooden frame that has no metal joints. Ban is the seventh Japanese architect to receive the prize since it was established in 1979, following Kenzo Tange in 1987, Fumihiko Maki in 1993, Tadao Ando in 1995, the team of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa in 2010, and Toyo Ito last year.

Japanese architect Toyo Ito, whose buildings have been praised for their fluid beauty and balance between the physical and virtual worlds, has won the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Along with Tadao Ando, the 1995 Pritzker laureate, the 71-year-old Ito is the dean of Japanese architecture, though with his mop of black hair he looks many years younger. He is best known for his 2001 Sendai Mediatheque, a seven-story glass box of a building that was dramatically shaken, though only lightly damaged, by the Tohoku earthquake two years ago. Some of Ito's notable creations include the curvaceous Municipal Funeral Hall in Gifu, Japan; the arch-filled Tama Art University Library in suburban Tokyo; the spiral White O residence in Marbella, Chile; his stadium for the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; and the angular 2002 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London. Like much of his work, it distills a series of complex technical breakthroughs into a spare, even-keeled finished product. The Mediatheque's structural and electrical systems are bundled inside 13 vertical tubes, leaving library and exhibition spaces open and accessible from all sides and visible from the street through floor-to-ceiling glass. Ito has designed museums, stadiums, houses and commercial buildings across Japan. His largest and most ambitious project to date, the 58 thousand square meters Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, is under construction in Taiwan and due to open next year. Ito began his career at Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates after he graduated from Tokyo University in 1965. He founded his own architecture firm in 1971. He has also been a teacher and mentor to many Japanese architects. Two former associates in his office, Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima, who run the firm SANAA, were the joint Pritzker winners in 2010. Ito will receive a US$ 100 thousand grant and a bronze medallion at the formal Pritzker ceremony May 29 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. The 71-year-old architect joins such masters as Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano and Wang Su, the first Chinese architect who wins the Pritzker Prize , in receiving the honor that's been called architecture's Nobel Prize. Ito, the sixth Japanese architect to receive the prize, was recognized for the libraries, houses, theaters, offices and other buildings he has designed in Japan and beyond.

2012 Pritzker prize awarded to Wang Shu - first Chinese architect to win the award, reported the official site of Pritzker Prize. Wang Shu runs Amateur Architecture Studio with his wife Lu Wenyu out of Hangzhou and is also the head of the Architecture Department of the China Academy of Art. A 48-year-old architect earned his first degree in architecture at the Nanjing Institute of Technology Department of Architecture in 1985, and then three years later he received his Masters Degree from the same institute. From there he went to work for the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou doing research on the environment and architecture in relation to the renovation of old buildings. In 1990 he completed his first architectural work - a 3.6 thousand square meter Youth Center in Haining, but it was not until 1997 when he and his wife, Lu Wenyu, founded their professional practice, which they named Amateur Architecture Studio. Although he is certainly no amateur, Wang named it thus because the definition of amateur means someone who does something purely out of pleasure rather than it just being work. Three years later in 2000, he completed his first major project, the Library of Wenzheng College at Suzhou University. Over the next decade Wang and his firm have completed a number of large-scale projects including museums, apartment buildings, and university campuses. Some of Wang Shu's most well known projects include the Library of Wenzheng College at Suzhou University, the Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum, the Ningbo History Museum, phase 1 and 2 of the Xingshan Campus of the China Academy of Art, and the Vertical Courtyard Apartments. Throughout his work Wang has paid close attention to the environment, the building's relationship to its site and surroundings, and the use of materials. In his project for the Xingshan Campus of the China Academy of Art, he salvaged over two million tiles from demolished traditional houses to cover the roofs of the campus buildings. Since 2000, Wang Shu has been the head of the Architecture Department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Last year, he became the first Chinese architect to hold the position of "Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor" at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has been a frequent visiting professor at UCLA, Harvard, the University of Texas, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has also received other awards including the 2004 Architecture Art Award of China, a Holcim Award for Sustainable Construction in the Asia-Pacific region, the 2010 Schelling Architecture Prize, and the 2011 French Gold Medal from the Academy of Architecture. Upon learning of his award, Wang Shu said, "This is really a big surprise. I am tremendously honored to receive the Pritzker architecture Prize. I suddenly realized that I've done many things over the last decade. It proves that earnest hard work and persistence lead to positive outcomes." The Pritzker Architecture Prize is awarded annually by the Hyatt Foundation to honour "a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture". Founded in 1979 by Jay A. Pritzker and his wife Cindy, the award is funded by the Pritzker family and is considered to be one of the world's premier architecture prizes; it is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture. The Pritzker Prize won such architectures, as Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and so on. Wang Shu will be formally honored with the presentation of the Pritzker Prize, the bronze medallion, and a US$ 100 thousand grant on May 25th in Beijing.