Forget the starchitects. Meet the 'anti-architect.' Liu Jiakun— winner of the 2025 Pritzker Prize, doesn't impose forms; he follows the flow of water, grief, and local brick. In a world of loud buildings, he makes a virtue of quiet. Liu Jiakun Architecture has been outstanding in the world.
Forget the starchitects. Meet the 'anti-architect.' Liu Jiakun— winner of the 2025 Pritzker Prize, doesn't impose forms; he follows the flow of water, grief, and local brick. In a world of loud buildings, he makes a virtue of quiet. Liu Jiakun Architecture has been outstanding in the world.
November 23, 2025
Forget the starchitects. Meet the 'anti-architect.' Liu Jiakun— winner of the 2025 Pritzker Prize, doesn't impose forms; he follows the flow of water, grief, and local brick. In a world of loud buildings, he makes a virtue of quiet. Liu Jiakun Architecture has been outstanding in the world.
"I aspire to be like water — permeating a place without imposing a fixed form, infiltrating the local environment and its essence. Over time, the water gradually solidifies, transforming into architecture and perhaps even into the highest form of human spiritual creation." Liu Jiakun, a 68-year-old architect, educator, and writer from Chengdu, China, became only the second Chinese architect to receive the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in March 2025.
The life of Liu Jiakun’s unfolds like a river — one that bends, diverges, and gathers new currents before finding its course. Trained as an engineer at the Chongqing Institute of Architecture and Engineering, he found himself drawn not to the precision of plans but to the fluid grace of literature and painting. After graduation, he briefly worked within the rigid confines of the Chengdu Architectural Design Academy before drifting away, disillusioned by bureaucracy.
The 1980s carried him westward, into the wide and quiet landscapes of Tibet and Xinjiang. There, he painted, wrote, and meditated, immersing himself in cultures shaped by wind and water, mountains and silence. These years of wandering became his source spring. They taught him that architecture, like a river, must move through emotion and memory, shaping and being shaped by the terrain of human life.
In 1993, an exhibition by a former classmate reignited his creative current. By 1999, he had founded Jiakun Architects in Chengdu.
He resists stylistic containment. Liu Jiakun architecture is a flowing system — adaptive, responsive, and attuned to its environment. He describes his work not as a “style” but a “strategy,” a way of reading the land and people before designing for them.
Liu’s projects share an emotional resonance that transcends their physical form. The Hu Huishan Memorial (Chengdu, 2009), built after the devastating Sichuan earthquake, is one of his most poignant works. Dedicated to a young girl who perished in the disaster, the memorial is constructed using what Liu calls “Rebirth Bricks” — rubble from the ruins, mixed with wheat fiber and cement.
In Liu’s hands, rebuilding becomes an act of emotional irrigation — transforming grief into growth, and pain into continuity.
The technique would surface again in projects such as the Novartis Shanghai Campus and the Shui Jing Fang Museum, each a confluence of memory and modernity.
In the dense currents of China’s urban transformation, Liu seeks equilibrium. His West Village project in Chengdu, for instance, reimagines an entire city block as a “maxi-courtyard”: a layered complex where residential, commercial, and cultural functions coexist seamlessly.
Wide pedestrian paths, bike lanes, and interconnected courtyards weave through the structure, creating a sense of openness rarely found in China’s high-density developments. The project demonstrates that density need not mean disconnection.
As Pritzker Prize jury chair Alejandro Aravena observed, “Liu Jiakun redefines the relationship between architecture, infrastructure, and public space — transforming cities into places of empathy and encounter.”
Similarly, the Xicun Compound (2015) reimagines communal living as a layered estuary of public and private spaces, eroding the boundaries that isolate modern life. Liu’s vision shows that even in a city of concrete, human connection can still flow freely.
Liu’s materials are chosen not for perfection but for their ability to breathe and weather. Concrete, brick, and timber are left raw, unadorned. Before he designs, he consults craftsmen, aligning his vision with their hands" “Once I understand what the workers can do, then I can design my building.”
The Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum (2002) captures this philosophy, its courtyards and pools echoing the brushstrokes of Chinese ink landscapes. The Suzhou Imperial Kiln Brick Museum (2016) carries the rhythm of ancient kilns into contemporary form, where light and shadow ripple across brick surfaces like waves on clay.
Liu’s architecture embraces the poetry of restraint in what he calls “appropriate technology,” or a balance between craft and practicality: “I’m not interested in high-tech or low-tech. Only in the right tech — the one that fits the place, the people, and the time.”
Throughout his four-decade career, Liu Jiakun has sought to dissolve the boundaries between utopia and reality. His buildings, whether civic or domestic, are imbued with a sense of “everyday idealism” — rooted in the lives of ordinary people but aspiring toward something greater.
The Tianbao Cave Renovation (Luzhou, 2021) exemplifies this ethos. Carved into a cliffside once marred by industrial decay, the project transforms the site into a serene cultural landscape. Rather than erasing the scars of the past, Liu integrates them into a new narrative, creating a dialogue between damage and renewal, nature and culture.
As the Pritzker jury noted in its 2025 citation, Liu’s architecture “balances density and openness, collectivism and individuality, memory and imagination.” It is architecture as reconciliation — between the physical and the emotional, the pragmatic and the poetic.
Though anchored in Chengdu, Liu’s influence flows far beyond. Liu has lectured at MIT, the Royal College of Art, and Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he continues to mentor the next generation. His writings, including The Conception of Brightmoon (2014) and Narrative Discourse and Low-Tech Strategy (1997), explore architecture’s intersections with literature, memory, and moral philosophy: “I find architecture and writing very similar, both are conspiracies — acts of creating something from nothing, guiding others to a climax.”
Announcing Liu Jiakun as the 54th Pritzker Laureate, Tom Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation, praised the architect’s “humanist vision” The award, he said, recognizes a practice that is “philosophical, grounded, and profoundly humane.”
