So are the works of Chinese architect Liu Jiakun, winner of the 2025 Pritzker Prize

Chinese architect Liu Jiakun is the winner of the 2025 Pritzker Prize for creating buildings in large cities that offer “A completely new scenario of everyday life”, Through open spaces that favor the community and with total respect for history, culture and nature.

“With an outstanding work, with deep coherence and constant quality, Liu Jiakun imagines and builds new worlds, free of any aesthetic or stylistic restriction“, Says the jury’s ruling, highlighting that the architect”He has developed a strategy that is never based on a recurring method, but on differently evaluating the specific characteristics and requirements of each project”

In this way, “Takes present realities and handles them to the point of offering, sometimes, a completely new scenario of everyday life”, What he executes with”Common sense and wisdom”And taking into account that the identity of people is both for their individuality and for the collective sense of belonging to a place.

“The cities tend to segregate functions, but Liu Jiakun adopts the opposite approach and maintains a delicate balance to integrate all the dimensions of urban life”Said the president of the Jury of the Pritzker, the Chilean Alejandro Aravena, winner of the award in 2016.

In a world “That tends to create endless boring peripheries, he has found a way to build places that are both buildings, infrastructure and landscapes. His work can offer shocking keys on how to face the challenges of urbanization, in a rapid growth time of cities“He added.

Born in Chengdu (southwest China), Liu graduated in 1982 at the Chongqing Architecture and Engineering Institute, and has always combined literature with architecture, which he has developed exclusively in his native country.

“Writing novels and practicing architecture are different art forms, and I did not deliberately combine them. However, perhaps due to my double training, there is an inherent connection between them in my work, such as narrative quality and the search for poetry in my designs”, Says Liu in statements collected by the Hyatt Foundation, promoter of the Pritzker and based in Chicago (USA).

Liu’s buildings are “Modern interpretations of Chinese classical architecture”, Including the classic Chinese millenary pavilions, as can be seen in the Suzhou Imperial Baked Brick Museum (2016) or in the Window walls of the Lancui pavilion of the EGRET Gulf wetland (Chengdu, 2013).

The staggered balconies of block C6 built for Novartis in Shanghai (2014) remind Torres that represent many dynasties and the Luyeyuan stone sculpture museum (Chengdu, 2002), which houses sculptures and Buddhist relics, is inspired by a traditional Chinese garden, which balances the old water and the old stones to reflect the natural landscape.

Liu believes that the human relationship with nature is reciprocal and that is why the buildings mimicate with their surroundings, which it achieves through the use of local and wild flora that grows in the bricks that places upside down to favor its growth.

“I always aspire to be like water, to penetrate a place without a fixed shape and to merge with the local environment. Over time, water gradually solidifies, transforming into architecture and perhaps even in the highest form of human spiritual creation. However, it still retains all the qualities of that place, both good and bad”, Explained the architect.

Also native bamboo groves plant in courtyards and buildings are designed with roof openings to allow trees to grow. Something that perfectly reflects its renovation project of the Tianbao Cave district in the town of Erlang (Luchou), completed in 2021.

The architect has developed most of his career in his native Chengdu and does not have any building built outside China.

In 2015 he participated in the Venice Architecture Biennial, where he carried a giant model of his West Village project, built in Chengdu, in which he rethink the role of civic spaces with an entire apple design, closed by buildings, but with huge side openings and a large central garden, which includes sports fields, parks surrounded by water and even running tracks.

And in 2018 he was the first architect who built outside the United Kingdom the temporary pavilion of the Serpentine London gallery, which since 2000 has designed great names of architecture, such as Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito, Oscar Niemeyer or Frank Gehry.

Liu built the pavilion in Beijing, less than a kilometer from the historic prohibited city and was inspired by confucionism, with an architecture that was a physical representation of the traditional search for Junzi (balance).

A design that simulates the figure of an goalkeeper, in the form of a curved volding beam that incorporated elasticity by stretched cables between steel plates and that standing for six months to house cultural acts.