Congratulations to Shigeru Ban who has been nominated the 2014 Laureate for the Pritzker Architecture Prize! Shigeru Ban visited IaaC in 2011, as part of the 2011 IaaC Winter Lecture Series, presenting a Lecture entitled: ¨ Works and Humanitarian Activities ¨. In his presentation, Mr. Ban shared a series of his projects with the audience such as: the Paper House, the Nomadic Museum, the Centre Pompidou-Metz and more. In the development of the Lecture Mr Ban elaborated both the conceptual background that supports these projects, as well as input regarding the Structural Performance of each one. He explained the influence of modernism, in particular Mies Van de Rohe, in terms of transparency and structural strategies, on his projects, using the Farnsworth house and the Barcelona Pavilion as main examples. The Lecture took place just one week after a devastating Earthquake in Japan, and it was interesting to see how Shigeru Ban is in fact greatly involved in humanitarian works developing with disaster relief projects such as Paper Log House (Kobe of Japan in 1995, Turkey in 2000, India in 2002), Paper Church (Kobe,1995), Tsunami Reconstruction Project (Kirinda, Sri Lanka, 2005), Temporary Elementary School (Chengdu, China, 2008), L’Aquila Temporary Concert Hall (L’Aquila, Italy, 2011) and his proposal for temporary shelters in Japan (Onagawa, Japan, 2011). To watch the Lecture, CLICK HERE.