Chinese architect and educator Liu Jiakun has been announced as the laureate of the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest honor in the architecture field. This prestigious award recognizes Jiakun, founder of Jiakun Architects (established 1999), for his ability to blend traditional Chinese elements with contemporary design and for his commitment to social equity in the built environment. Born in Chengdu, China, where he continues to live and work, he becomes the second Chinese architect to receive the accolade, following Wang Shu (2012). Jiakun joins a distinguished list of previous laureates including Riken Yamamoto in 2024, David Chipperfield in 2023, and Francis Kéré in 2022. The award ceremony will be held this spring at the Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre Abu Dhabi, with a global video release of the presentation this fall, followed by the 2025 Laureates’ Lecture and Symposium in May.
Escaping stylistic constraints, Liu Jiakun’s work relies on adaptive strategies to harmonize collective and individual spaces, encouraging empathy and an emotional connection to both architecture and community. Through his architecture, respite and openness find space within dense urban environments, inviting diverse users to partake in the spectacle of everyday life. Attention to cultural, historical, and natural elements creates a familiar atmosphere and an architecture embedded in its surroundings. The use of raw materials and the embrace of imperfections offer an honest expression of the processes that lead to the finished work.
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
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Liu Jiakun, born in Chengdu in 1956, took an unconventional path to becoming an architect. After graduating with a Bachelor of Engineering in Architecture from Chongqing University in 1982, his early career involved rebuilding post-revolution China, including a significant period in Nagchu, Tibet (1984–1986). A pivotal moment occurred in 1993 when considering abandoning architecture, he attended a solo exhibition by his classmate Tang Hua. This experience reignited his passion, inspiring a commitment to personal expression through design. This led to a period of intense intellectual growth, collaborating with artists and writers and refining his unique design philosophy. He founded Jiakun Architects in Chengdu in 1999.
In addition to his architectural achievements, Liu Jiakun is a prolific writer, exploring themes of utopia, human experience, and the inherent narratives within design. His published works, including “The Conception of Brightmoon” (Times Literature and Art Publishing House, 2014), “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). reflect his multifaceted perspective, demonstrating a deep engagement with the human condition that informs his architectural philosophy.
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. – Liu Jiakun
Balancing Utopia and Everyday Life
Liu Jiakun’s architectural philosophy resists oppositions such as history and modernity, collectivism and individual expression, utopia, and realism. Instead, he creates spaces that blend these seemingly contradictory forces to offer ordinary citizens spaces that enrich their daily experience. This approach is achieved by the careful integration of each project into its social, cultural, and historical contexts. Rather than imposing a singular aesthetic, his design solutions adapt to the specific needs and characteristics of each commission.
This pragmatic idealism is evident in projects such as the Songyang Three-Temple Cultural Communication Center, as they prioritize human-centered design that fosters a sense of belonging and shared identity. Jiakun’s literary pursuits further illuminate this approach, exploring the complex interplay between utopian ideals and the realities of human existence. Beyond simple structure, his buildings act as narratives, weaving together the threads of history, community, and individual experience to create spaces that resonate with both idealism and everyday reality.
Between Density and Spatial Openness
Through his architecture, Liu Jiakun challenges the conventional understanding of density, demonstrating that high-population areas need not sacrifice openness. He achieves this by incorporating public spaces within his designs, creating vibrant, interconnected environments that foster community interaction. The Xicun Compound in Chengdu serves as a prime example. This five-story building, encompassing an entire city block, integrates expansive pedestrian and cycling paths, offering open and enclosed routes that connect residents with the surrounding urban fabric and facilitate a range of community activities. Similarly yet at a different scale, the Sculpture Department Building at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing maximizes usable space through innovative cantilevering, demonstrating a commitment to openness even within constrained site conditions.
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. – Jury Chairman and 2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate Alejandro Aravena
An Honest Expression of Materials and Processes
To better reflect the processes that led to the creation of architecture and the passing of time, he eschews polished surfaces and refined finishes, instead embracing the textures and imperfections that develop over time, giving his buildings a unique patina that speaks to their history and context. This commitment is in his use of locally sourced and often recycled materials—for example, the rubble from the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake transformed into resilient bricks used in projects such as the Novartis Building and the Xicun Compound. This approach, reflecting his “building for the community, building by the community” ethos, extends even to smaller-scale projects, such as the Hu Huishan Memorial, where the raw texture of the cement relief carries both symbolic and physical weight.
Liu Jiakun’s four-decade career encompasses a diverse range of projects across China, including significant contributions to academic, cultural, and commercial architecture, as well as urban planning. Notable works include the Clock Museum at the Jianchuan Museum Settlement, the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute’s design department building, the Cultural Communication Center of the Three Temples of Songyang, and the first Serpentine Pavilion outside London, situated near Beijing’s Forbidden City. This extensive body of work has garnered international recognition, showcased in prestigious exhibitions including the Venice Biennale and the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale. His significant contributions have also been recognized through numerous awards, including the Far East Architecture Award and the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award. He currently serves as a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and has lectured widely at institutions such as MIT and the Royal College of Art.
The jury citation highlights Liu Jiakun’s profound understanding of place, his innovative and sustainable approach to density, and his ability to empower communities by weaving together tradition and modernity—qualities that led to his selection for the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize. This decision was reached by a distinguished jury including Alejandro Aravena (Chair), Barry Bergdoll, Deborah Berke, Stephen Breyer, André Corrêa Do Lago, Anne Lacaton, Hashem Sarkis, Kazuyo Sejima, and Manuela Lucá Dazio.
2025 Pritzker Prize Jury Citation
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.
We invite you to check out ArchDaily’s comprehensive coverage of the Pritzker Prize.
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