Pritzker Prize 2025: Liu Jiakun from China awarded the Nobel Prize in Architecture

Pritzker Prize 2025: Liu Jiakun from China awarded the Nobel Prize in Architecture

Over the course of its 46-year history, the... Pritzker Prize, considered the most prestigious award in architecture, often won by iconic architects: seemingly lonely geniuses who shape the world with their visions. It is a sign of the industry's changing priorities that this year the Pritzker Prize, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of architecture," was awarded to a man who actively avoids a recognizable style.

Liu Jiakun: An architect with no recognizable style

Liu Jiakun, who was announced Tuesday as the 2025 laureate, has spent most of his roughly four-decade career designing low-key academic buildings, museums and public spaces in his hometown of Chengdu (and nearby Chongqing) in China's southwest. His hyper-local and self-described “low-tech” techniques came at the expense of a distinctive aesthetic.

An innovative approach to architecture

Instead, in China's period of architectural abundance, Liu has quietly profited by letting each site, as well as the surrounding history, nature, and craft traditions, dictate his designs. Whether reusing earthquake debris or creating spaces where native flora can thrive, for Liu, methodology matters more than form. In their statement, the Pritzker Prize jury praised Liu precisely because of this approach: “He pursues a strategy instead of a style.”

“Act like water”

Ahead of the announcement, the 68-year-old architect (who admittedly was "a little surprised" by the award) said he was trying to "act like water." "I strive to penetrate and understand the place...then when the time is right, the idea of ​​the building will solidify," he said in a video call from Chengdu, adding: "A fixed style is a double-edged sword. It can help others remember you quickly, but it also restricts and takes away a certain freedom."

A return to the roots

Liush's firm, Jiakun Architects, has completed over 30 projects - all in China - in nearly as many years. The architect was often inspired by the history of his country. Traditional pavilions influenced the flat roof overhangs of his Imperial Tile Museum in Suzhou; The surrounding balconies of the Shanghai campus he designed for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis are reminiscent of a tiered pagoda. But Liu emphasizes that these allusions to the past are never just for nostalgic reasons.

Reinterpreting tradition for modern use

“I focus on the themes that the tradition addresses rather than the forms it presents,” he explained. In other words, elements of traditional architecture need to be reinterpreted for functional, modern use and not just used as homages to bygone times. Examples of the opposite abound in China's cities, where curved roofs are added to otherwise characterless buildings to achieve an ill-defined "Chineseness."

A new beginning for China

Born in 1956, three years before China's (and arguably the world's) most devastating famine, Liu Jiakun's childhood revolved around the hospital in Chengdu where his mother worked. He showed an early talent for art and literature, although, like many of his generation, his teenage years endured cultural revolution were interrupted when he was sent to the countryside as part of Mao's "educated youth" program.

However, Liush's career fell squarely in the post-Mao period - a period in which architecture was liberated from state control and socialist ideals. He accepted a place at the Institute of Architecture and Engineering in Chongqing in 1978, two years after the former Chinese Communist leader's death, and graduated amid reform policies that opened China's centrally controlled economy to free-market forces.

A sign of progress

This period brought enormous changes to architecture. Important foreign texts and journals in the field of architecture entered the country and became widely available to students and academics. State-controlled design institutes, like the one where Liu worked early in his career, were finally allowed to charge fees, after previously serving only the state. However, in the fast-paced atmosphere of 1980s China, Liu still felt that architecture was “lagging behind.” “When I graduated, it seemed like architects had nothing to do,” he said. “The economy had not developed and ideas were not active.”

Inspiration from the past and a look into the future

In the early 1990s, as Liu was also pursuing writing at the time, he considered giving up architecture. He changed his mind after seeing an exhibition by a former classmate, architect Tang Hua, which inspired him to escape the shadows of his sector's state-controlled past. In 1999 he founded Jiakun Architects, one of the first private practices in the country. The company's early projects laid a foundation for understanding Liu's ethos.

Everyday architectures rethought

His Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum, which opened in Chengdu in 2002, sits peacefully in a bamboo forest, its rough exposed concrete and gray slate facade harmonizing with the stone artifacts housed within. The setbacks and overhangs of his rust-colored building for the Department of Sculpture, completed two years later for the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, are themselves sculptures. At the Museum of Clocks in Chengdu, the textured brick facade is more reminiscent of the region's humble past than a bright future.

As architecture in China became increasingly bold and bombastic in the 2010s (a trend that eventually led to the country's cabinet, the State Council, calling for a halt to "oversized, xenotropic and whimsical" buildings), Liush's work remained quiet and understated - even as the scope of his commissions grew. Liu himself admits that his company was always too small to tackle the skyscrapers or mixed-use megaprojects that were reshaping China's skylines. But even as his work increasingly encompassed corporate real estate and urban regeneration, his motivations lay elsewhere. “I’m not very interested in the drive to create taller and bigger buildings,” he said. "I don't necessarily consciously disagree with it. I'm just not very interested in it."

Focus on the public and the environment

Instead, Liu is trying to remedy some of the ills brought about by his country's rapid urbanization. "China's cities are developing very quickly, but face two major challenges," he said. "One is the relationship with public space and the other is the relationship with nature. I think my works focus on these two aspects."

The symbiosis between nature and architecture is evident in Liush's ambitious West Village, an inner-city block in Chengdu transformed into a courtyard, but on a neighborhood scale. Sloping paths lead cyclists and pedestrians around a five-story building that circles soccer fields and lush greenery—a vertically reimagined park. This big public gesture is accompanied by many small measures. For the paving, Liu used bricks that were made with holes and filled with soil, allowing grass to sprout through the center.

Innovations for a better future

A few miles away, the Shuijingfang Museum was built with equally thoughtful building materials: “rebirth brick.” These were created by Liush's company from debris from the Wenchuan earthquake that devastated the Sichuan region in 2008. The reconstructed bricks (made by mixing the rubble with wheat stalks and cement) were used in several of his projects. This is an innovation that illustrates why Liu is celebrated for practicing a type of everyday architecture in which local context plays a major role.

A look beyond the borders

But does this mean that the architect's vision will always be limited to China, the country he understands best? Despite the design of the first overseas pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London in Beijing in 2018 and lecturing at institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Liu has never completed a project abroad. Asked whether he would appreciate the prospect of a prestigious international assignment that winning the Pritzker Prize will surely offer, Liu said his approach is certainly applicable to foreign contexts if enough research and preparation takes place. “From the perspective of method and methodology, there is actually no problem doing this abroad,” he said, adding: “As long as I know the place completely, I think (my) set of methods is completely applicable.”

This article was written with contributions from CNN's Hassan Tayir.