Above: Sendai Mediatheque, 1995—2000, Sendai-shi, Miyagi, Japan. Photo by Tomio Ohashi. Via Dezeen.

Japanese architect Toyo Ito has been named as the 2013 laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Read the announcement and see a visual overview of his life’s work, including the Sendai Mediatheque library (which survived the 2011 earthquake), on Dezeen.

He calls the Sendai Mediatheque, completed in 2001 in Sendai City, Miyagi, Japan, one of the high points of his career. In the Phaidon book, Toyo Ito, he explains, “The Mediatheque differs from conventional public buildings in many ways. While the building principally functions as a library and art gallery, the administration has actively worked to relax divisions between diverse programmes, removing fixed barriers between various media to progressively evoke an image of how cultural facilities should be from now on.”

[Via Spoon & Tamago’s facebook page. See their post here.]