Liu Jiakun: Get to Know the 2025 Pritzker Winner's Work

Written by Hana Abdel
Published on March 04, 2025

The 2025 Pritzker Prize has been awarded this year to Chinese Architect Liu Jiakun. Born in Chengdu in 1956, he grew up in the densifying city, before attending and graduating from the Chongqing Architecture and Engineering College (Chongqing University) in 1982 with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Architecture, and becoming one of the first college graduates to be tasked with rebuilding the country during the Chinese transition period. However, it wasn't until many years later that the architect understood that "the built environment could be used as a medium for personal expression". It was then that his endeavors and career took off, with Liu Jiakun starting his practice in 1999, and participating in more collaborative works across China and Europe. Based on his experiences, his works are anchored in his understanding of reality and a respect towards China's multi-traditional history and internal diversity; all while achieving a seamless balance between architecture and nature, tradition and modernity.

These concepts do not obstruct his consciousness of human needs and the importance of community spaces. Through his projects, Liu Jiakun proves that spaces can affect human behavior and become positively evocative. A public space such as those he's created can be conducive to a benevolent atmosphere that provides rest and collaboration. "such as my pursuit of narrative and poetry in design." The comprehensiveness of Liu Jiakun's works makes it easy not to be constrained by stylistic or aesthetic limitations or requirements. He just follows what the site, natural landscape, pre-existing urban frame, and citizen needs might require. The physical result is a mix of all of these with the predominant vernacular traditions.

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His works throughout China are of larger scales, with many museums, cultural initiatives, parks, and entire zone revivals. He's often working in densely populated cities where public and open spaces might be harder to identify or insert. One of Liu Jiakun's noticeable solutions to these projects is the dispersal of the interventions along the assigned large site and the uniqueness in which each of them is incorporated, all while maintaining a similar design language. His strength in these cases, is his ability to bridge buildings, infrastructures, landscapes, and public spaces at the same time through his design, thus effectively solving pressing urban issues with the use of local materials, and traditional craftsmanship wherever he can. His interventions seem to be woven into the existing urban fabric, and direct the user/visitor through a poetic storyline and historic journey. Get to know some of the 2025 Pritzker Laureate's projects below.

Chinese Architect Liu Jiakun Receives the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize