Poetry in architecture
"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", says Liu. Born in Chengdu, People's Republic of China, in 1956, he started his own practice, Jiakun Architects, in 1999. His work to date includes more than thirty projects ranging from academic and cultural institutions to public spaces, commercial buildings and urban planning throughout China. His most important buildings currently include the Watch Museum, Jianchuan Museum Cluster (Chengdu, China, 2007), the design department of the new campus of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (Chongqing, China, 2006), the Lodging Centre of China International Practice Exhibition of Architecture (Nanjing, China, 2012), the Chengdu High-Tech Zone Tianfu Software Park Communication Center (Chengdu, China, 2010) and the Songyang Culture Neighborhood (Lishui, China, 2020).
With his architecture, Liu Jiakun embraces the genius loci, the spirit of the place, and respects craftsmanship and local traditions. Together with his team, he creates new places for the community in public spaces even in densely populated areas, that serve citizens in their everyday lives. Far from self-congratulation he address people's well-being in addition to purely functional aspects. "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 sometimes a whole new scenario of daily life. Beyond knowledge and techniques, common sense and wisdom are the most powerful tools he adds to the designer’s toolbox," states the 2025 Jury Citation, in part.
The jury also notes that Liu Jiakun takes into account both the individual and the collective sense of belonging to a place. He takes up Chinese tradition as a springboard for innovation, without nostalgia or ambiguity. For him, identity refers to the history of a country, the traces of its cities and the relics of its communities. With the Suzhou Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick or the Shuijingfang Museum in Chengdu, for example, he creates a new architecture that is simultaneously a historical record, a piece of infrastructure, a landscape and a remarkable public space. In the Huishan Memorial in Chengdu, he assumes that identity is a matter of both collective and personal memory, and elevates the individual perspective to a fundamental element of place-making in order to revitalise a communal dimension. Liu Jiakun also strives for a technical level that is ‘appropriate’ in each case, that is, based on local knowledge and the materials and craftsmanship available.
At the same time, he creates new landscapes – from the West Village to the renovation of the Tianbao Cave District in the city of Erlang in Luzhou to the Luyeyuan Museum of Stone Sculpture in Chengdu, the built and natural environments exist in a reciprocal relationship and in harmony with the oldest Chinese philosophy and tradition. ‘He shows us how architecture can mediate between reality and idealism, elevating local solutions to universal visions. He develops a language that describes a socially and ecologically just world,’ said the jury* in its statement.
*The nine-member jury for this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize, headed by Alejandro Aravena, includes architects Anne Lacaton, Kazuyo Sejima, Deborah Berke and Hashim Sarkis.
