Meet Liu Jiakun, 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate

work by Liu Jiakun, 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate, by Liu Jiakun, 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate

West Village

(Image credit: Courtesy of Arch-Exist)

Liu Jiakun has been named the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate. The Chinese architect, based in Chengdu, China and the founder of Jiakun Architecture, established in 1999, has become the 54th winner of the highly coveted architecture honour.

The architect was celebrated by the Pritzker Prize organisers and jury for his elegant balance and interweaving of seemingly contrasting notions – past and present, collectivism and individuality, and utopia and the everyday.

Meet Liu Jiakun, 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate

Through his career, spanning over 25 years, Jiakun has turned his hand to a variety of typologies, from public space, to cultural work, office and housing. Key projects include West Village (Chengdu, China, 2015) a large scale multi-use complex; design for education, such as the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute Department of Sculpture (Chongqing, China, 2004); The Renovation of Tianbao Cave District of Erlang Town (Luzhou, China, 2021); and the headquarters for Novartis (Shanghai) Block - C6 (Shanghai, China, 2014).

work by Liu Jiakun, 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate — Novartis (Shanghai) Block - C6

Blending local and global, history and modernity, the architect has found contemporary expressions for his region's architecture through works that find harmony between materials and shapes that feel transcendent in their scope and reach.

'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,' the 2025 Jury Citation says in its essay.

'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.'

Jiakun said, in response to his win: 'Architecture should reveal something – it should abstract, distill and make visible the inherent qualities of local people. It has the power to shape human behaviour and create atmospheres, offering a sense of serenity and poetry, evoking compassion and mercy, and cultivating a sense of shared community.'

jiakun.com

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Ellie Stathaki is the Architecture & Environment Director at Wallpaper*. She trained as an architect at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and studied architectural history at the Bartlett in London. Now an established journalist, she has been a member of the Wallpaper* team since 2006, visiting buildings across the globe and interviewing leading architects such as Tadao Ando and Rem Koolhaas. Ellie has also taken part in judging panels, moderated events, curated shows and contributed in books, such as The Contemporary House (Thames & Hudson, 2018), Glenn Sestig Architecture Diary (2020) and House London (2022).