Liu Jiakun Wins 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Architect Liu Jiakun, a native of Chengdu, China, has been named the 2025 laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, long considered architecture's highest honor. Today's announcement describes Liu as an architect who continues to practice and reside in Chengdu, “prioritizing the everyday lives of fellow citizens through his works.”
Liu Jiakun, founder of Jiakun Architects, is the 54th Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and the second from China, following Wang Shu in 2012. Just as Wang Shu and Amateur Architecture Studio were not widely known back then but have gained fame in the years since, Liu Jiakun is not a famous architect on the international stage, though this obscurity will surely change with the media attention that swirls around each annual announcement of the Pritzker Prize and, more importantly, people around the world seeing the incredibly high caliber of his firm's work.
The most impressive of Jiakun Architects' projects is West Village, a large mixed-use complex built in Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province and Liu's hometown, in 2015. Focused on providing sports and leisure facilities for residents of the surrounding high-rise residential blocks, the five-story courtyard building also has space for cultural and artistic events, as well as space for creative and fashion industries. Liu's largest project since founding his office in 1999, West Village is indicative of what Pritzker jury chair Alejandro Aravena describes as “[Liu's] way to build places that are a building, infrastructure, landscape and public space at the same time.” It is not surprising that this project is the first one mentioned by the Pritzker Prize in today's announcement.
"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. 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."
Though large, West Village also embodies other relatively intimate qualities the jury singled out in awarding Liu the 2025 Pritzker Prize. “His honest architecture presents the sincerity of textural materials and processes,” the announcement reads, “displaying imperfections that endure, rather than degrade, through time.” Such imperfections can be found in the landscapes of West Village, as in the photo above, as can his preference for “traditional craft and often using raw local materials that sustain the economy and environment, built for and by the community.” Furthermore, Liu's belief “that the human relationship with nature is reciprocal” is evident on the roof of West Village, where we find his oft-used brick pavers that are upended to enable grasses to flourish through their openings.
“For embracing rather than resisting the dystopia/utopia dualism and showing us how architecture can mediate between reality and idealism, for elevating local solutions into universal visions, and for developing a language that describes a socially and environmentally just world, Liu Jiakun is named the 2025 Pritzker Prize Laureate.”
Liu Jiakun will be honored at a celebration in Abu Dhabi in the spring, and via a virtual ceremony video in the fall. The 2025 Laureate Lecture and Panel Discussion will be held in May and be open to the public in-person and online; World-Architects will post details on that event when they become available. And World-Architects will have a longer feature on the architecture and career of 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate Liu Jiakun later this week.
Photos of other selected projects by Liu Jiakun:
