Below we present a series of videos with his latest statements and works.
Accompanied by the jury's statement:
"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."
