Liu Jiakun, the founder of Jiakun Architects, has been named the laureate of the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the 54th edition of the award regarded internationally as architecture’s highest honor.
The jury citation read as follows: “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.
“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.”
Liu’s career spans over four decades, with more than thirty projects ranging from academic and cultural institutions to civic spaces, commercial buildings and urban planning throughout China.
Liu creates public areas in populated cities where the luxury of space is largely absent, forging a positive relationship between density and open space. By multiplying typologies within one project, he innovates the role of civic spaces to support the breadth of requisites for a diverse society.
Gallery: Notable works of Liu Jiakun
Notable works by Liu include Museum of Clocks, Jianchuan Museum Cluster (Chengdu, China, 2007); Design Department on new campus, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (Chongqing, China 2006), Lodging Center of China International Practice Exhibition of Architecture (Nanjing, China, 2012), Chengdu High-Tech Zone Tianfu Software Park Communication Center (Chengdu, China, 2010), and Songyang Culture Neighborhood (Lishui, China, 2020).
Architecture should reveal something—it should abstract, distill and make visible the inherent qualities of local people. It has the power to shape human behavior and create atmospheres, offering a sense of serenity and poetry, evoking compassion and mercy, and cultivating a sense of shared community.
Liu jiakun
The jury citation continued: “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.”
Cities tend to segregate functions, but Liu Jiakun takes the opposite approach and sustains a delicate balance to integrate all dimensions of the urban life. In a world that tends to create endless dull peripheries, he has found a way to build places that are a building, infrastructure, landscape and public space at the same time. His work may offer impactful clues on how to confront the challenges of urbanization, in an era of rapidly growing cities.
Alejandro Aravena, Chair of the Jury and 2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Tom Pritzker, Chairman of The Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the award, said: “Liu Jiakun uplifts through the process and purpose of architecture, fostering emotional connections that unite communities. There is a wisdom in his architecture, philosophically looking beyond the surface to reveal that history, materials and nature are symbiotic.”
An unexpected pathway to architecture
Born in 1956 in Chengdu, People’s Republic of China, Liu 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. He credits the environment of the Christian medical institute for cultivating his lifelong inherent religious tolerance. Although nearly all of his immediate family members were physicians, he displayed an interest for creative arts, exploring the world through drawing and literature, eventually prompting a teacher to introduce architecture as a profession.
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.
Working for the state-owned Chengdu Architectural Design and Research Institute in his early career, he volunteered to temporarily relocate to Nagqu, Tibet (1984–1986), the highest region on earth, which he attributed to his “fear of nothing and painting and writing skills.” During those years and the several that followed, he was an architect by day, but an author by night, deeply engrossed in literary creation.
“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,” Liu said.
Liu established Jiakun Architects in 1999 in Chengdu and continues to practice and reside in the city. He is a visiting professor at the School of Architecture Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China.