Robust Urbanism Makes a Sociocultural Statement

This year's Pritzker Architecture Prize goes to Liu Jiakun. “Liu who?” people not familiar with the architecture scene in China might ask themselves. Liu belongs to the first generation of architects who studied after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). He received his diploma in Chongqing in 1982 and then worked in the provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang for a state design institute in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Liu switched to writing and was quite successful with his novels. At the end of the 1990s, the poet Zhai Yongming opened the White Nights bar in Chengdu, which became a productive nucleus for the new. There, the architect met with artist friends and clients, such as the painters He Duoling and Luo Zhongli, for productive exchanges.

In the 1990s, Liu Jiakun began with small architectural experiments for artist friends who had their studio buildings erected in the countryside. In the villages, there was a gray area without conventional building laws, as the mayors could grant permission for temporary buildings without red tape. During this period, in which Liu was also active as a writer, he developed his architectural spatial sequences like a narrative, in which paths and stagings with views and insights played an important role. 

I met Liu Jiakun in 2000 through a friend in Berlin. A year earlier, at the UIA Congress in Beijing, the meeting of the International Union of Architects, I had bought a magazine that included the aforementioned studio buildings. With Liu Jiakun's and Yung Ho Chang's help — I had also met the latter during the UIA congress in 1999 — I was able to develop the exhibition “TU MU: Young Architecture form China” at the Architekturforum Aedes in Berlin, in which we presented the later Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu and Ai Weiwei alongside the two of them and Ma Qingyun, Zhang Lei, Ding Wowo, Wang Junyang, and Zhu Jingxiang. In 2001, this was the first exhibition of contemporary Chinese architects held outside the country; it opened up architectural developments in China to an international audience.

Liu Jiakun's buildings in the early years were abstract compositions that blended into their rural surroundings. With simple walls “decorated” with pebbles from the nearby river, rough plaster surfaces, and simple tectonic structures, he pushed the limits of what was possible with unskilled workers. His involvement with Le Corbusier, Charles Correa, and Luis Barragán is evident in the architectural solutions — the Xiyuan Leisure Complex, for example. The search for appropriate technologies also characterized his work in his first museum for private clients, the Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum, which appears like a massive concrete sculpture imprinted with the ghost of the brick formwork.

His architectural approach, which he has been able to develop over the last 25 years, particularly in his home province of Sichuan, focuses on social reality and integration into the environment with respect for the context. With a feel for local solutions, Liu interprets historical models in a contemporary way. After the beginnings in rural areas came urban commissions, for which new solutions had to be found. Ways of life, leisure behavior, street culture, and cultural niches formed a substrate from which he gradually developed porous and multi-coded spaces that could be adapted to social conditions on the fly.

In this respect, the large-scale West Village project in Chengdu is an extraordinary contribution to urban planning issues in the rapidly growing Chinese dormitory cities that have thousands of apartments but only a few places of social significance. In West Village, which takes up an entire block (178 × 237 m / 583 x 777 feet) and brings together the city's fashion scene and creatives, it is not so much the architecture that matters, but rather the stimulation of the users, who find small-scale cultural and artistic events here. West Village acts like a collective living room in the city, a social container for urban life that vitalizes the community. This creates social and cultural sustainability. This type of urban incubator does much to shape a city from a collection of houses. For Liu Jiakun, architecture is not an end in itself, but offers spaces for individual development. The complex seduces us into a new kind of local urbanity that arises from the pressure of daily needs for a relaxing city and a highly original urban lifestyle.

In contrast to the large urban structure of the West Village stands the 9 m² (100 sf) memorial to Hu Huishan, the schoolgirl who died when a school collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008. The shape of the small memorial is reminiscent of a simple house, painted pink on the inside in the student's favorite color and, in addition to the personal memory, also stands as an example for all the other people in the region who died due to the poor quality of the buildings.

Liu Jiakun's architectural language is sensitive and powerful. With a radically modernized tradition, he anchors his buildings in local history, as if in passing. With a small-scale offering, he knows how to provoke users to get involved and shape the possibilities of the spaces for contemporary culture. If Liu Jiakun is now honored with the Pritzker Prize, then alongside the 2012 Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu, a second contemporary voice from China will appear in the international discourse who has never completed an education at a foreign university. Liu Jiakun's architectural approach and concepts are important for China, but they can also serve as a role model for other parts of the world.