Liu Jiakun, a Chengdu-based architect identified for his delicate, place-driven method to design, has been awarded the 2025 Pritzker Structure Prize, essentially the most prestigious honor in structure. Liu, who has spent a long time crafting a physique of labor rooted within the traditions and supplies of his native Sichuan province, is barely the second Chinese language citizen to obtain the prize, following Wang Shu in 2012.
The Pritzker jury praised Liu for utilizing “Chinese language custom with out nostalgia, however as a springboard for innovation,” crafting areas that operate as historic data, infrastructure, landscapes, and public boards. His tasks, which vary from museums and universities to total city districts, reject the monumentalism of up to date Chinese language structure in favor of constructions that quietly combine into the rhythms of on a regular basis life.
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One in every of his most notable works, West Village in Chengdu, exemplifies this fashion. The five-story mixed-use advanced features as a vertical metropolis block, with walkways and ramps connecting open-air plazas, outlets, eating places, and sports activities services in a dynamic, multi-level public area. The construction was briefly “a sufferer of its personal success” The Guardian mentioned—after 9,000 individuals flocked to the rooftop promenade on a single day, authorities shut down entry. It has since reopened.
Liu’s work can be deeply tied to social and environmental issues. After the devastating 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, he pioneered the usage of “rebirth bricks,” repurposing rubble blended with wheat fiber to rebuild devastated areas. His latest tasks, together with the revitalization of historic websites and a 45-hectare transformation of a former steelworks in Hangzhou, proceed his philosophy of mixing previous and current.
“I aspire to be like water,” Liu says. “To seep into a spot with out carrying a hard and fast type of my very own.”
