Chinese architect and writer Liu Jiakun has been named as the winner of the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize, becoming the 48th annual laureate of the profession’s most coveted award. Celebrated for his innovative, culturally attuned and distinctly humane approaches to cohabitation and urban density, Liu’s portfolio includes a wealth of cultural projects that put contemporary China into critical, forward-looking dialogue with heritage and history.
Born in Chengdu in 1956, Liu Jiakun graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Architecture from the Institute of Architecture and Engineering in Chongqing (now named Chongqing University) in 1982. Although he hailed from a family of physicians — and spent much of his youth roaming the hospital where his mother worked — he found himself innately drawn to the built environment. “Like a dream, I suddenly realized my own life was important,” says the 68-year-old Liu, recalling his 1978 decision to study architecture.
His first years as an architect were spent working in the Nagqu Prefecture in Tibet — at one of the highest elevations on the planet. An employee of the Chinese state-owned Chengdu Architectural Design and Research Institute, Liu volunteered to relocate to the remote region. “My major strength of the time seemed to be my fear of nothing, and, in addition, my painting and writing skills,” he says, reflecting on the drive. An architect by day and a budding novelist by night, the young Liu began his design career during an era defined by transformative change and rapid urbanization across China.
Yet, like many emerging design practitioners the world over, Liu became disillusioned with the daily reality of design practice. Throughout his mid-thirties, he contemplated leaving the architectural profession. By 1993, he was on the verge of quitting design altogether. That year, however, he attended an exhibition showcasing the work of former architecture school classmate Tang Hua. As Liu’s Pritzker biography notes, the exhibit inspired him towards a “move from prescribed societal aesthetics.”
In 1999, he founded Jiakun Architects in his hometown of Chengdu. Throughout its first two decades, Liu’s eponymous practice gradually became known for its culturally and spiritually rich work in housing and across a range of civic typologies. While drawing on Chinese vernaculars and building heritage — like walled enclosures and contemplative gardens — Liu’s buildings mine “the Chinese tradition as a springboard for innovation devoid of nostalgia or ambiguity,” notes the 2025 Pritzker Prize Jury.
“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,” notes the Jury Citation. Chaired by Chilean architect and 2016 Pritzker winner Alejandro Aravena, the 2025 jury celebrates Liu’s work for its deeply public yet intimate and thought-provoking sensibilities. “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.”
As a housing designer, Liu’s work is equally striking. For instance, Chengdu’s groundbreaking 135,552-square-metre West Village complex (completed in 2015) wraps a muscular apartment block around an interior “maxi-courtyard” — a centrifugal green core that combines vast open spaces and sprawling soccer pitches with a series of more intimate neighbourly gathering spots.
At the opposite end of the scale, Liu’s 2009 Memorial to Hu Huishan unfolds as a moving tribute — to a teenager who died in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 — within the scale of the makeshift tents typically erected in the wake of an earthquake. Here, the most spartan and ordinary of settings takes on a poetic depth.
“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,” notes the jury. It is a body of work rooted less in style than sensibility, and one that situates the past and future, hope and despair, ecology and environmental destruction, within a complex and compassionate dialogue.
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