Liu Jiakun wins 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize

Chinese architect Liu Jiakun has been named the winner of this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize for his buildings that "celebrate the everyday lives of people".

Liu is the 54th laureate of the annual Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is considered the most significant award in international architecture.

This year's jury, chaired by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, selected Liu in recognition of how he has placed people and communities at the forefront throughout his four-decade career.

He is the third architect from China to receive the award since its inception in 1979, following Chinese-American architect IM Pei and Amateur Architecture Studio founder Wang Shu.

"In a global context where architecture is struggling to find adequate responses to fast evolving social and environmental challenges, Liu Jiakun has provided convincing answers that also celebrate the everyday lives of people as well as their communal and spiritual identities," said the jury.

"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," it continued.

"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."

Liu was born in Chengdu, China, in 1956. He embarked on his journey to becoming an architect in 1978, when he was accepted to study at the Institute of Architecture and Engineering in Chongqing – now Chongqing University.

He graduated in 1982 and began his career at the state-owned firm Chengdu Architectural Design and Research Institute, while simultaneously establishing himself as a writer.

Nearly two decades later, in 1999, he founded his eponymous studio Jiakun Architects, with which he has built more than thirty projects, in his home city of Chengdu.

“Writing novels and practicing architecture are distinct forms of art, and I didn't deliberately seek to combine the two," Liu once said.

"However, perhaps due to my dual background, there is an inherent connection between them in my work – such as the narrative quality and pursuit of poetry in my designs."

The majority of Liu's works are located in public areas in populated cities, reflecting his interest in designing for people.

Among his key projects are Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum, Museum of Cultural Revolution Clocks and the mixed-use West Village complex, completed in 2002, 2007 and 2015 respectively.

“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," Liu once 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.”

His firm is also behind the Department of Sculpture and the Design Department for Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (2004 and 2006), Hu Huishan Memorial (2009) and Suzhou Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick (2016).

Liu was also the architect behind the inaugural Serpentine Pavilion Beijing in 2018 – the first Serpentine Pavilion outside of the UK.

Among his titles are I Built in West China?, a book published in 2009, in which he discusses experiences of working in western China, and The Conception of Brightmoon, a book published in 2014 that explores his architectural philosophies.

Alongside chair Aravena, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2016, this year's jury also included previous laureates Anne Lacaton of Lacaton & Vassal and Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA, who won in 2021 and 2010 respectively.

Also on the jury was architect Hashim Sarkis, architecture historian Barry Bergdoll and Yale School of Architecture dean Deborah Berke.

It was completed by lawyer Stephen Breyer, architecture critic André Aranha Corrêa do Lago and executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Manuela Lucá-Dazio.

Last year's Pritzker Architecture Prize was awarded to Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto. Other recent winners include David Chipperfield, Diébédo Francis Kéré and Grafton Architects founders Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara.

Read on for the full jury citation.

The portrait of Liu is by Tom Welsh for The Hyatt Foundation/The Pritzker Architecture Prize. 

Jury citation

The Pritzker Architecture Prize is conferred in acknowledgment of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which have persistently produced significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.

In a global context where architecture is struggling to find adequate responses to fast evolving social and environmental challenges, Liu Jiakun has provided convincing answers that also celebrate the everyday lives of people as well as their communal and spiritual identities.

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 a whole new scenario of daily life. Beyond knowledge and technique, he adds common sense and wisdom to the designer's toolbox.

The built environment is often being pulled in opposite directions. While density appears to be a more sustainable solution for people to live together, the scarcity of space usually implies a poor quality of life. Liu Jiakun rethinks the fundamentals of density through cohabitation, crafting an intelligent solution that balances the opposite forces at play. Through transformative projects like the West Village in Chengdu, he reshapes the paradigm of public spaces and of community life. He invents new independent, shared ways of living together in which density does not represent the opposite of an open system. He also enables adaptation, expansion and replicability. Liu Jiakun enhances and welcomes the life that inhabitants bring to his projects, creating an architecture activated by its publics.

In Liu Jiakun's work, identity is as much about the individual as it is about the collective sense of belonging to a place. He revisits the Chinese tradition as a springboard for innovation devoid of nostalgia or ambiguity. For him, identity refers to a country's history, the traces of its cities and the relics of its communities. At the same time, he integrates the local and global dimensions with unprecedented results. In his subtle, memorable museums, Suzhou Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick or the Shuijingfang Museum in Chengdu, he creates new architecture that is at once a historical record, a piece of infrastructure, a landscape, and a remarkable public space. In the Hu Huishan Memorial in Chengdu, he understands that identity is a matter of both collective and personal memory, brilliantly elevating the individual perspective to a foundational element of place-making in order to revive a communal dimension.

Liu Jiakun also seeks a level of technology that is neither high nor low but rather the “appropriate” one based on local wisdom as well as materials and craftsmanship available. Since his early projects, he has broken the current architectural language to introduce the qualities of simplicity, deriving from the resources at disposal. His sincerity in the use of materials lets them speak for what they are, as their integrity does not require mediation or maintenance. It also enables them to age without fear of deterioration because the collective memory is held within them.

To such available cultural and social resources, Liu Jiakun adds nature creating new landscapes within the landscape. From the West Village to the Renovation of Tianbao Cave District of Erlang Town in Luzhou, to the Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum in Chengdu, the built and natural environments co-exist in a reciprocal relation and in line with the most ancient Chinese philosophy and tradition.

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.

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