Awards

Liu Jiakun, Pritzker Prize 2025

04/03/2025

Liu Jiakun

Chinese architect Liu Jiakun wins Pritzker 2025

Born in 1956, Liu Jiakun lives and works in his native city, Chengdu, capital of the province of Sichuan in southwest China, where he opened his practice in 1999. He grew up in a family of physicians, but very early on showed an inclination towards the arts, equally exploring literature and drawing before opting to study architecture, a field he was, after graduating, on the verge of abandoning when an exhibition of Tang Hua, a former schoolmate at university, led him to rediscover it as a personal medium of expression. As Liu recounts, that moment was the true start of his career, in the course of which he has produced an extraordinary body of work that reinterprets Chinese tradition with a contemporary vision, while seeking to connect with both the individual and the collective sense of belonging to a place.

Located in the city of his birth, Chengdu, the Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum (2002), the Museum of Clocks (2007), and the Shuijingfang Museum (2013) are some of his most significant works, along with others elsewhere in the country, such as the Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick in Suzhou (2016), the Songyang Culture Neighborhood in Lishui (2020), and the Renovation of Tianbao Cave District in Luzhou (2021).

The author of several books, among them Narrative Discourse and Low-Tech Strategy (1997), Now and Here (2002), I Built in West China? (2009), and The Conception of Brightmoon (2014), the Chinese architect says: “Writing novels and practicing architecture are distinct forms of art, and I didn’t deliberately seek to combine the two. However, perhaps due to my dual background, there is an inherent connection between them in my work.”

The jury – chaired by Alejandro Aravena and including Anne Lacaton, Kazuyo Sejima, Barry Bergdoll, and Deborah Burke – has stated: “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. 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.”

Liu Jiakin is the third Chinese architect to be honored with the prestigious accolade given yearly by the Hyatt Foundation since 1979 (following the Chinese-American Ieoh Ming Pei in 1983 and Wang Shu in 2012), which comes with a US$100,000 cash prize. The award ceremony will take place on 5 May at Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi.