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Liu Jiakun has been announced as the 2025 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize – an award described by the Pritzker team as “architecture’s highest honour.”
According to the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury, Liu was a deserving recipient due to his endorsement of architecture as a transcendent power that forges community, inspires compassion and elevates the human spirit.
“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,” the jury’s citation noted.
“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. Beyond knowledge and techniques, common sense and wisdom are the most powerful tools he adds to the designer’s toolbox.”
Hailing from Chengdu, China, Liu founded his practice Jiakun Architecture in 1999. Over a career spanning four decades, the practice has produced more than 30 projects ranging from academic and cultural institutions to civic spaces, commercial buildings and urban planning projects across China.
Liu’s work is celebrated for its ability to create public space in densely populated urban environments. “By multiplying typologies within one project, he innovates the role of civic spaces to support the breadth of requisites for a diverse society,” the Pritzker Architecture Prize media communique reads.
Significant projects of Liu’s include West Village (Chengdu, China, 2015) – a five-storey building enclosed by a perimeter of ramped pedestrian pathways on the site of an entire city block, and the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute Department of Sculpture (Chongqing, China, 2004) – a project that maximises space with protruding upper levels on a narrow site.
Liu aspires to honour classic Chinese architecture through contemporary interpretation and pursue honest, enduring materiality across each of his projects. He prefers traditional craft and local raw materials that sustain the economies of the communities in which he practices.
For Liu, “Architecture should reveal something – it should abstract, distil and make visible the inherent qualities of local people. It has the power to shape human behaviour and create atmospheres, offering a sense of serenity and poetry, evoking compassion and mercy, and cultivating a sense of shared community,” he explained.
Chair of the jury and 2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate Alejandro Aravena reflected, “Cities tend to segregate functions, but Liu Jiakun takes the opposite approach and sustains a delicate balance to integrate all dimensions of the urban life.”
“In a world that tends to create endless dull peripheries, he has found a way to build places that are a building, infrastructure, landscape and public space at the same time,” Aravena noted. “His work may offer impactful clues on how to confront the challenges of urbanization, in an era of rapidly growing cities.”
Other significant works of Liu’s include: Museum of Clocks, Jianchuan, Museum Cluster (Chengdu, China, 2007); Design Department on new campus, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (Chongqing, China 2006); Lodging Center of China International Practice Exhibition of Architecture (Nanjing, China, 2012); Chengdu High-Tech Zone Tianfu Software Park Communication Centre (Chengdu, China, 2010); and Songyang Culture Neighborhood (Lishui, China, 2020).
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