Liu Jiakun Awarded 2025 Pritzker Prize
135March 5, 2025
Chinese architectLiu Jiakunhas beennamedthe winner of the 2025 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s most prestigious honor. He is the second Chinese architect to win the award since it was established in 1979. Liu is known not for hewing to a specific style but for a method that responds to the social and material history of a given site. Among his best-known projects are the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute Department of Sculpture in Chongqing, the panda maternity ward at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, and the Rebirth Brick Project, begun in 2008, which saw him repurpose rubble from the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, which destroyed four-fifths of the region’s structures, making it into bricks that he used in buildings as disparate as Chengdu’s Shuijingfang Museum, Shanghai’s Novartis building, and Chengdu’s West Village, a block-square community complex encircling an enormous green courtyard.
“Through an outstanding body of work of deep coherence and constant quality, Liu Jiakun imagines and constructs new worlds, free from any aesthetic or stylistic constraint,” wrote the prize jury in its citation. “Instead of a style, he has developed a strategy that never relies on a recurring method but rather on evaluating the specific characteristics and requirements of each project differently. That is to say, Liu Jiakun takes present realities and handles them to the point of offering sometimes a whole new scenario of daily life.”
Liu was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, in 1956. His mother was an internist, and Liu spent his early years wandering about the brick hospital in which she worked, occasionally going up to the roof, from which he could see an array of traditional wooden homes spread out far below. He credits the experience with fostering his interest in architecture. After graduating from the Institute of Architecture and Engineering in Chongqing (now Chongqing University) in 1982, he took a job at a state-owned architecture firm and volunteered to work in Tibet, where he lived from 1984 to 1986. The young Liu also nursed aspirations of becoming a writer and honed his literary craft in his off hours. His devotion paid off.
“What writing does for me,” he toldNPR, “is that it gives me more perspectives. Observations about society and human behavior. There are also vocabularies that are similar in architectural design and in literature.”
Following the transformative 1993 experience of seeing a solo exhibition by his onetime architecture school classmate Tang Hua, Liu rededicated himself to architecture, establishing his own practice, Jiakun Architecture, in 1999.
“Architecture should reveal something—it should abstract, distill and make visible the inherent qualities of local people,” said Liu in a statement. “It has the power to shape human behavior and create atmospheres, offering a sense of serenity and poetry, evoking compassion and mercy, and cultivating a sense of shared community.”