There’s a lot to be mentioned about what an structure award functionally does: The AIA Gold Medal acknowledges cumulative impression; journal awards present alternatives for rising practices by showcasing design expertise or lesser-known initiatives. However the Pritzker Prize is somewhat completely different, higher understood as a “Nobel Prize” for structure that honors an expression of design values over one’s profession. Current awardees, for instance, embody Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal (2021), acknowledged for his or her devotion to adaptive reuse, and Frances Kéré (2022), whose deal with design and social justice has introduced his apply important acclaim.
This yr, the 2025 Pritzker Prize has been awarded to Chinese language architect Liu Jiakun, 69, founding father of Jiakun Architects. He’s identified for his course of—understanding particular nuances of a selected web site, together with its social and materials histories—and portfolio, that are outlined by an ethos, not any specific type.
Chinese language architect Liu Jiakun, 69, is the winner of the 2025 Pritzker Prize.
For a lot of People, Jiakun’s work has flown below the radar. The Guardian’s Olly Wainwright notes that he’s solely the second Chinese language architect to have gained the prize in its 46-year historical past, working completely in China on cultural and tutorial establishments, in addition to civic areas, lots of which inject dense, city situations with pure options. However what makes his work so distinctive is how every challenge cracks open the positioning’s distinctive heritage and challenges, producing buildings that, in response to the award announcement, “philosophically [look] past the floor to disclose that historical past, supplies and nature are symbiotic.”
Maybe this concept is most evident in his “Rebirth Brick Mission” that started after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake that destroyed almost four-fifths of all buildings within the affected space. The analysis premise was easy: to reuse rubble as an combination combined with cement and straw fibers in rebuilding after the catastrophe; since then, these bricks have been used all through his work together with the Shuijingfang Museum, which celebrates the world’s oldest wine store. Positioned in Chengdu’s cultural district, the museum homes a contemporary distillery and historical cellar, using Rebirth Bricks and bamboo scrimber to keep up a residential scale and native palette.
The Shuijingfang Museum is made from a variety of supplies from authentic timber to eco-friendly “Rebirth Bricks” from the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.
The bricks are additionally utilized in his largest challenge, the West Village district in Chengdu. The structure and concrete planning challenge spans a whole metropolis block and options companies organized round public outside areas linked by a sequence of stairs and sloping ramps. Like a zigzagging vertical park, the challenge speaks to what the Pritzker jury quotation calls “creating new landscapes throughout the panorama.”
The West Village is constructing, infrastructure, panorama and public house—all inside one setting.
The phrase “knowledge” seems all through the award quotation, which is fascinating when you think about that the career usually champions technical prowess and stylistic individuality. “Knowledge” speaks to an innate figuring out, one thing that was maybe fostered by Jiakun’s background. He calls himself an “unintended architect,” per the Guardian; although he obtained an structure diploma in 1982, not lengthy after the Cultural Revolution, he spent years writing novels and practising portray whereas working for the state-owned Chengdu Architectural Design and Analysis Institute.
As he instructed the New York Instances, it wasn’t till he attended an exhibition of labor by Tang Hua, a former classmate, that he realized he would possibly “even have private expression by structure [which allows him]…to get into individuals’s lives and have a deeper understanding of it.” In that sense, such knowledge is expressed by a sympathetic understanding concerning the lives lived inside and round his buildings.
Such sentiments might be seen in even his smallest initiatives: a tiny memorial to a 15-year-old earthquake sufferer—realized as a everlasting concrete reduction tent stuffed along with her private belongings—speaks not simply to the lack of one baby, however to the lack of collective reminiscence after disasters. A sequence of small, elevated tea homes within the Jinhua Artwork and Structure Park join guests to the plush pure panorama: frosted corrugated partitions open outward to offer views or to shut for intimacy. But he additionally selected to make use of current utility poles as columns for every tea home, permitting these constructions to increase or be replicated anyplace, creating an financial system of supplies and use.
Constructed within the aftermath of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, Liu Jiakun’s memorial assumes the type of a short lived reduction tent, however in enduring plaster.
It speaks to what Alejandro Aravena, chair of the jury and 2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate, characterizes as “a technique to construct locations which might be a constructing, infrastructure, panorama and public house on the identical time.” These initiatives usually are not significantly flashy, nor do they converse loudly to authorship. As an alternative, they have a good time wise supplies—some thoughtfully industrial, many handmade or produced regionally—with out neglecting conventional strategies, historical past or bodily context.
High photograph of the West Village in Chengdu courtesy of Qian Shen Pictures.
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