The 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate.
Liu Jiakun is the newly awarded 2025 Pritzker winner!
“Architecture should reveal something—it should abstract, distil 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.”
Liu Jiakun
Liu Jiakun is the 54th winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. He was born in Chengdu, People’s Republic of China.
The 2025 Jury statement states that by weaving together seemingly disparate situations such as utopia versus everyday existence, history versus modernity, and collectivism versus individuality, Liu offers an architecture that celebrates the lives of citizens. He champions the transcendent power of the built environment through the harmonization of cultural, historical, emotional, and social dimensions, using architecture to create community, “inspire compassion, and uplift the human spirit.”
“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 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,” states the 2025 Jury Citation, in part.
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 public."
According to the 2025 Jury Citation.
Museum of Clocks, Jianchuan Museum Cluster, photograph courtesy of Bi Kejian.
The last awardees were.-
2024 RIKEN YAMAMOTO.
2023 DAVID CHIPPERFIELD
2022 FRANCIS KÉRÉ
2021 ANNE LACATON AND JEAN-PHILIPPE VASSAL
2020 YVONNE FARRELL AND SHELLEY MCNAMARA
2019 ARATA ISOZAKI
2018 BALKRISHNA DOSHI
2017 RAFAEL ARANDA, CARME PIGEM AND RAMÓN VILALTA
2016 ALEJANDRO ARAVENA
2015 FREI OTTO
2014 SHIGERU BAN
2013 TOYO ITO
2012 WANG SHU
2011 SOUTO DE MOURA
.../...
The award consists of USD 100,000 (equivalent to €93,631.50) and a bronze medallion with the inscription of "firmness, commodity, and delight", about the classic Vitruve motto "firmitas, utilitas, venustas".
The prize takes its name from the Pritzker family, whose international business interests are headquartered in Chicago. Their name is synonymous with Hyatt Hotels, located throughout the world. The Pritzkers have long been known for their support of educational, scientific, medical, and cultural activities. Jay A. Pritzker, (1922-1999), founded the prize with his wife, Cindy. His eldest son, Thomas J. Pritzker, the current president of The Hyatt Foundation, explains, "As native Chicagoans, it’s not surprising that our family was keenly aware of architecture, living in the birthplace of the skyscraper, a city filled with buildings designed by architectural legends such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and many others."
2025 JURY
This year there are changes in the jury. The independent jury of experts ranges each year from five to nine members. Jury members, who have the mission of selecting the laureate each year, serve for multiple years to ensure a balance between past and new members. The jury members are selected for their high recognition in their fields of architecture, business, education, publishing, and culture. No members of the Pritzker family or outside observers are present during jury deliberations, which usually take place during the first months of the calendar year.
Alejandro Aravena, 2020-present (Chair 2021-present) - 2016 Pritzker Laureate.
Barry Bergdoll, 2019-present.
Deborah Berke, 2019-present.
Stephen Breyer, 2012-present.
André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, 2017-present.
Anne Lacaton, 2025-present, 2021 Pritzker Laureate.
Hashim Sarkis, 2025-present.
Kazuyo Sejima, 2017-present - 2010 Pritzker Laureate.
Manuela Lucá-Dazio, 2020-present (Executive Director).
