Pritzker Award 2025

Pritzker Award 2025 win by Chinese architect, Liu Jiakun

Liu Jiakun’s pathway to architecture was neither linear nor expected.

Born in 1956 in Chengdu, People’s Republic of China, he spent much of his childhood in the corridors of Chengdu Second People’s Hospital, founded as Gospel Hospital in 1892, where his mother was an internist.

At seventeen, Liu was part of China’s Zhiqing, or program of “educated youth” assigned to vocational peasant farming in the countryside. Life, at the time, felt inconsequential, until he was accepted to attend the Institute of Architecture and Engineering in Chongqing (renamed Chongqing University) in 1978. Admittedly, he didn’t fully comprehend what it meant to be an architect but, “like a dream, I suddenly realized my own life was important.”

Liu graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Architecture in 1982 and was amongst the first generation of alumni tasked with rebuilding China during a transformative time for the nation.

He nearly relinquished his architecture career until attending the 1993 solo architectural exhibition of Tang Hua, a former classmate from university, at the Shanghai Art Museum, reigniting his passion for the profession and fueling a new mindset that he, too, could deviate from prescribed societal aesthetics. He considers this transformational realization—that the built environment could serve as a medium for personal expression—as the moment that his architectural career truly began. He would soon experience his most formative years of intellectual growth, debating the purpose and power of architecture with contemporaries, including artists Luo Zhongli and He Duoling, and poet Zhai Yongming.

Spanning four decades, Liu, along with his team, has built more than thirty projects, ranging from academic and cultural institutions to civic spaces, commercial buildings and urban planning throughout China, and was selected to design the inaugural Serpentine Pavilion Beijing (2018).

“Writing novels and practicing architecture are distinct forms of art, and I didn’t deliberately seek to combine the two. 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.”

His written works have included The Conception of Brightmoon (Times Literature and Art Publishing House, 2014), exploring the conflict between utopias and human life, Narrative Discourse and Low-Tech Strategy (China Architecture & Building Press, 1997), Now and Here (China Architecture & Building Press, 2002) and I Built in West China? (Today Editorial Department, 2009).

“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. 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.”

He established Jiakun Architects in 1999 in Chengdu, firmly upholding the transcendent power of architecture while understanding that it is a product of community, spirituality, tradition and the preexisting.

Liu has been featured in many international exhibitions. Currently, he is a visiting professor at the School of Architecture Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing, China)