Harnessing dualities in architecture, Liu Jiakun receives the 2025 Pritzker Prize

In a 2020 interview with STIR, the seasoned (though ‘incidental’) Chinese architect remarked how he found the practice of architecture and writing congruent. Equating them both to forms of "conspiracies", perhaps monickering the quintessential creation in both from nothing yet drawing on everything, Liu Jiakun mused that both were required to lead the ‘audience’ to a particular outcome, a climax. In the architectural realm, he drew parallels to a few tenets that assume definitive proportions in his repertoire (spanning four decades and over 30 buildings of inimitable fortitude); the tenets being rhythm, structure, surprise, balance and proportions. These tenets, while serving as essential entry points into understanding the ethos of Jiakun’s architecture, also form parts of the Jury’s extensive citation for him being the 54th Pritzker Laureate, being awarded what many consider to be ‘architecture’s top honour’.

Jiakun’s non-linear foray into architecture led him through thick brambles of uncertainty, growing up in his home town of Chengdu in the People’s Republic of China where he now resides and practices, that he navigated with parallel cultural pursuits: literature and poetry, painting and meditation. The Pritzker Architecture Prize winner has indeed been quite vocal in expressing how his work—largely though not reductively speaking to a sculptural quality—can be seen as a pursuit of poetry and narrative clarity; another duality or “antipode” that gleefully comes alive in and empowers his architecture.

While the sculptural quality, or the aforementioned visual fortitude, is embossed through the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute Department of Sculpture (Chongqing, China, 2004) and the Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum (Chengdu, China, 2002), the latter modelled after a traditional Chinese garden, his pursuit of poetics in architecture is more deeply reflected in smaller, sensitive interventions in the Hu Huishan Memorial for example, kindling hope for a nation in mourning from the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.

“Architecture should reveal something—it should abstract, distill 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 expresses in an official statement upon the announcement of the 2025 Pritzker Prize.

On the other hand, Tom Pritzker, Chairman of The Hyatt Foundation sponsoring the award, states, “Liu Jiakun uplifts through the process and purpose of architecture, fostering emotional connections that unite communities. There is a wisdom in his architecture, philosophically looking beyond the surface to reveal that history, materials and nature are symbiotic," speaking with high adulation about Jiakun.

The West Village in Chengdu, his largest project to date, speaks to a distinctly social character that he aspires to inculcate in his works, irrespective of scale. Here too, a duality, a contradiction comes alive in yielding spaces for leisure in public projects in a city remarkably infamous for its lack of space, doubling upon his juxtaposition of a utopia and dystopia, especially in works tipping more towards the urban side. Alongside his smallest project, the Hu Huishan Memorial, a number of his projects bear a glee-ridden albeit thoughtful intervention in the form of their material constituents - the “Rebirth Bricks” that Jiakun devised by upcycling rubble from the ruins of the earthquake by reinforcing them with local wheat fibre and cement. The architect remarks that he revives both material and spirits through these bricks—in keeping with Chinese tradition and philosophy—in what is essentially an act of poetically rebuilding from hubris, lives more than architecture.

Liu Jiakun will be awarded the 54th Pritzker Architecture Prize at a ceremony and celebration to be held at The Louvre in Abu Dhabi, UAE, this spring, followed by the Laureate Lecture and Panel Discussion in May.