Architect Liu Jiakun Takes The 2025 Pritzker Prize
Like the Nobel, Pritzker Architecture Prize winners are laureates. Each laureate chosen has a body of work that “demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.” Today, Liu Jiakun becomes the latest architect to be named a Pritzker Laureate, and it’s well deserved.
The 69-year-old architect and founder of Jiakun Architecture is known for work that underscores the way people are intended to use a space. Not just the way they use the space, in fact, but who, and where, they are. “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.”
Liu has been producing architectural poetry for four decades. Though often referred to as free from a definitive or trademark style, Liu’s work is defined by adherence to function. “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,” states the Pritzker Jury citation. “...Beyond knowledge and techniques, common sense and wisdom are the most powerful tools he adds to the designer’s toolbox.”
Living and working in his hometown, Chengdu, China, Liu is perhaps best known for creating cultural institutions and urban, multiuse structures. For example, the West Village, in Chengdu, China is a multi-story office and recreational center that takes up an entire block and, kind of like a sports stadium, is built around a central courtyard; the Museum of Clocks in the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, and the Department of Sculpture at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. “I always aspire to be like water—to permeate through a place without carrying a fixed form of my own and to seep into the local environment and the site itself,” he said. “Over time, the water gradually solidifies, transforming into architecture, and perhaps even into the highest form of human spiritual creation. Yet, it still retains all the qualities of that place, both good and bad.”
Read more about Liu and the prize here.
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