Liu Jiakun wins 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize

Liu Jiakun, an architect based in Chengdu, whose work can be both muscular and nimble, was appointed Laureate of the Pritzker architecture award in 2025. His buildings often employ traditional Chinese elements such as walled housing and gardens, but do this in a modern and poetic way. For example, his art museum of the stone sculptures in Luyeyuan, which was completed in Chengdu in 2002, shows itself as a series of cast boxes that divide in a dense landscape of bamboo and trees that enter the visitors over a narrow ramp over the floor. Liu choreographer movement between nature and in, from one pavilion to the other, from forest to garden and back again. Buddhist sculptures and relics inside hug gray-brick walls, while glass strips can superior to the exhibited work of art.

Luyeyuan Stone Skulpture Art Museum (2002), Chengdu, People's Republic of China. Photo by Bi Kejian

Since his company was founded in 1999 in the southwestern province of Sichuan, 68, his architecture has developed separately from the more attacking hubs from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. In recent years, however, he has carried out projects in eastern cities such as Shanghai, Suzhou and Nanjing. The 54th Pritzker Laureate since the beginning of the award in 1979 he has been the second from China; Wang Shu won in 2012 and practices with his wife Lu Wenyu as an amateur architecture studio.

Museum of the watches, Jianchuan Museum Cluster (2007), Chengdu. Photo with the kind permission of ore

“In a global context in which the architecture is fighting to find adequate reactions to fast -developing social and ecological challenges, Liu Jiakun has provided convincing answers that also celebrate the daily life of people and their common and spiritual identities,” says Pritzker. Much of Lius work tries to reconcile the needs of the individual and the larger community and often create spaces of contemplation or break apart from busy urban contexts. The museum of the watches, which is, for example, part of the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Chengdu, offers a trio of red-brick structures, the high interiors of which serve as almost spiritual retreat from the Scrappy Commercial District around the project.

In West Village, another project in Chengdu, Liu played with scale, Pay attention to the delimitation of a huge city block with extensive recreation areas in the center and at the same time the individual paving stones that allow indigenous grass to grow through their hollow kernels. For the project of the project, he designed a five -story structure, which is polluted from a commercial building from the trade building to open ramps for joggers and cyclists and to switch from an most opaque building to an architectural veil. West Village plays in a dense urban substance and is an oasis of healthy activity for residents of the big city.

West Village (2014), Chengdu. Photo with the kind permission of ore

West Village (2014), Chengdu. Photo with the kind permission of ore

Lius's smallest project, Hu Huishan Memorial, honors the life of a young girl who died in the earthquake in Wenchuan in 2008 and killed more than 90,000 people and killed entire villages and cities. In the form of an auxiliary tent, but consisting of plastered walls, the one-room structure deals with both the collective grief of a nation and the unique dreams of a 15-year-old student of the middle school who loved and hoped to become a writer. The design alludes to the omnipresent of the emergency tents built after the catastrophe, which, however, combines with its pink interior with Hu Huishan backpack, its sneakers and other personal possessions. In the years after the earthquake, Liu used in a series of projects from the disaster from the disaster “Red birth from brick”, which pass from the destruction to renewal.

Hu Huishan Memorial (2009), Chengdu. Photos by Iwan Baan

“We start with the story,” said Liu about his design process in an interview with Record. “But the story is abstract, indirect.” On the other hand, he adds: “Memory is the story that I have experienced personally. It is more authentic and more specific. I try to inject this kind of memory into my work. ”

Department of Sculptures, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (2004), Chongqing, People's Republic of China. Photo by Bi Kejian

After graduating from the Chongqing Institute of Architecture and Engineering in 1982, Liu joined a large design institute in Chengdu, but was soon dismissed by his profession. He spent several years in Tibet, worked for the Chengdu Architectural Design and Research Institute and at the same time wrote fiction, painting and practiced meditation. Finally he returned to Chengdu and founded Jiakun Architects in 1999. China has a long history of scientists who retire in forests and mountains to maintain reflection and then return to society in order to get involved again with critical issues. His timing was by chance when China started building boom for decades when he started his company. Since it depends on economic activity, according to Liu, architecture often remains behind other artistic disciplines. “In the early 2000s, when the architecture was booming, she discussed many topics that had already tackled literature and art in the 1980s and 90s.” States Liu: “Literature is the basis of everything because the language is important for everything.” Liu says that skills are important in both writing and in the design, “expands my perspective and enables me to think more.”

Songyang Culture Quarter (2020); Lishui, People's Republic of China. Photo with the kind permission of ore

The Pritzker -Jury quotation announces Liu “for taking it, instead of opposing the dualism of dystopia/utopia and showing us how architecture can convey between reality and idealism to develop local solutions in universal visions and to develop a language that describes a social and environmentally friendly world.”

The renovation of the Tianbao Cave district in Erlang Town, Luzhou, People's Republic of China (2021). Photos with the kind permission of ore

In the past ten years, Lius has submitted work from an office building in Shanghai for Novartis, a central garden and a bamboo lamb, a museum in Suzhou, which has dedicated itself to the history of the Ming and Qing dynasty, a number of small insertions in Songyang in Zhejian province and a series of Smallba -Districts in the province of Zhejian. The currently ongoing projects include adaptive reuse of the Hangzhou Grand Canal Steelworks Park, the film Sound Museum & feature film exhibition hall in Xichang Jianchuan Museum Cluster and a branch of the Librairie Avantgarde in the city of Huize in the province of Yunnan.

Novartis Block C6, Shanghai (2014). Photo with the kind permission of ore

“I always strive to be like water – to penetrate through a place without wearing your own shape and sitting in the local environment and the place itself,” says Liu.

Liu Jiakun will be awarded his Pritzker Prize at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi in May.