Steven Holl has been announced as one of six 2014 laureates of the prestigious Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award. Bestowed by the Japan Art Association, the annual award is one of the highest international prizes for architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and theatre/film. 

It was established in 1988 to celebrate Japan Art Association's 100th anniversary and to honor the late Prince Takamatsu, who was a patron of the association for 58 years and had faithful commitment to the arts.

The Praemium Imperiale recognizes lifetime achievement in the arts in categories that aren't covered by the Nobel Prize, and comes with a cash prize of 15 milion yen (approx. US$150,000).

The 2014 laureates also include: South African playwright Athol Fugard, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, French painter Martial Raysse, and Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone. The 2014 Grant for Young Artists (5 million yen, or US$50,000) will be given to the Zinsou Foundation in Benin, West Africa. 

Winners will formally accept the prizes in Tokyo on October 15. Each recipient will also be given a specially designed gold medal and testimonial letter from honorary Japan Art Association patron, Japan's Imperial Highness Prince Hitachi.

Here's more info about the award:

"The 2014 winners join a group of 129 artists comprising many of the greatest cultural visionaries of the 20th and 21st centuries. They include Ingmar Bergman, Leonard Bernstein, Peter Brook, Anthony Caro, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Jean-Luc Godard, David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Akira Kurosawa, Renzo Piano, Robert Rauschenberg, Mstislav Rostropovich and Ravi Shankar.

The international advisory panel includes William Luers, a former president of the United Nations Association of America and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a retired American ambassador and diplomat; Lamberto Dini, a former Italian prime minister; Christopher Patten, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and former Chairman of the BBC Trust; Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, President of Germany’s Goethe-Institut; former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin; and Yasuhiro Nakasone, a former Prime Minister of Japan.

Honorary advisors are Jacques Chirac, the former President of France; philanthropist David Rockefeller, the former CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank; David Rockefeller, Jr., a philanthropist and environmentalist; former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt; Richard von Weizsäcker, former President of the Federal Republic of Germany; and François Pinault, founder of Kering, the French retail conglomerate."

Click the thumbnails below for some of Steven Holl's work.