Pritzker Prize for Chinese architect Liu Jiakun

The Chinese architect Liu Jiakun (68) wins the Pritzker Architecture Prize from 2025. For his buildings that “celebrate the daily lives of people”, he receives the architecture prize that is seen as the highest honor in the profession worldwide.

Liu does not have a style, writes the jury, but rather a strategy. The existing circumstances are important in his work, he mainly uses materials that “are normal, contemporary, cheap and local,” the jury said. His strategy is not based on a fixed method but in a way of evaluating what is needed and what is possible.

In 1999 Liu founded his own desk in Chengdu, his hometown. With Jiakun Architects, he completed more than thirty projects in China, including museums, public spaces and university buildings.

One of its largest projects is West Village in the Milloon City Chengdu from 2015. It is a court complex with space for culture, sports, leisure, office and shops. With five floors, lots of vegetation of grass and bamboo and space for cyclists and pedestrians, the complex is modest and simple. “In cities, functions are often separated, but Liu Jiakun chooses the opposite approach, and has found a delicate balance with which he integrates all the dimensions of urban life into one complex,” said Pritzker-Jury Chairman Alejandro Araava. Jiakun “makes buildings, infrastructure, landscape and public space in one.”

Earthquake

In China, Liu Jiakun became known after the earthquake in Sichuan of 2008, in which 70,000 people died. The architect made new bricks of a mix of the earthquake trunk, local grain and cement. He called them ‘rebirth bricks’bricks of rebirth. The area could be rebuilt with the bricks, was the idea.

In 2009, Liu Jiakun made a memorial house for a fifteen -year -old student who had died in that earthquake. The HU Huishan Memorial is reminiscent of emergency aid tents that are set up in disaster areas. You can see the student’s things: a backpack, a scarf, notes. The monument “is an expression of personal emotion, but also of a collective memory,” said Liu.

The jury of the Pritzker Prize praises how the architect shows “how architecture can find a middle ground between reality and idealism,” for incorporating local solutions in universal visions, and “for developing a language describing a social and climate-just world”.

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