The 2013 Pritzker jury has awarded this year's prestigious Architecture Prize to 71-year-old Japanese architect Toyo Ito, who has four decades of built work to his credit; and has been a presumed Pritzker front-runner for more than ten years.

While honoring Ito with the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the jury acknowledged the fact that the well-established architect has, in his four-decade career span, created architecture which "projects an air of optimism, lightness and joy;" with his work notably "infused with both a sense of uniqueness and universality."

Ito, along with 1995 Pritzker laureate Tadao Ando, is the dean of Japanese architecture; and is best known for his 2001 Sendai Mediatheque, a seven-story glass box of a building, which the Tohoku earthquake shook dramatically two years back, though the building did not suffer much damage.

In his career span as an architect, Ito has designed a number of commercial buildings, houses, museums, and stadiums all across Japan; with his biggest and most ambitious project being that the 620,000 square-foot Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, which is currently being built in Taiwan, and is scheduled to open in 2014.

Reacting with surprise to the news that he was the winner of the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize, Ito said in a Skype interview from his Tokyo office: "After a Chinese architect won last year and SANAA three years ago, I did not expect it would be me this time,"