The Chinese architect Liu Jiakun wins the Pritzker Prize 2025

The winner of this year Pritzker architecture priceannounced on Tuesday Liu Jiakun.

The prize, founded in 1979, is generally referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Architecture”.

Liu comes from Chöngdu in the province of China's Sichuan. He was born there in 1956. His childhood spent roaming the halls of the large brick hospital in which his mother worked as an internist. “Sometimes when we were young, we went to the roof of the building to see the whole city,” he recalled during an interview with NPR.

From this high point of view, he said, he could pergene about districts, which are still filled with traditional wooden Chinese houses. After completing the college in 1982, he worked for a state architectural firm in Tibet. But he wanted to become a writer.

“At that time me [had] Two identities, “said the architect.” One [was] as a worker in the architecture company and another [was] Do my passion, write. ”

Liu spoke to NPR of his offices in Chengdu. His translator was his 24-year-old son Martin. Both father and son wore black glasses and black turtleneck sweaters. They also shared a solemn influence that was occasionally melted into ironic giggles.

Nowadays, Liu said, he sees similarities between the letter – he wrote several books – and his practice as the designer of buildings and built environments.

“What the writing does for me,” he said, “is that I have more perspectives. Observations about society and human behavior. There are also vocabulary that are similar in architectural design and literature. There are always beginnings and there are always endings. And then there are always height and there are always buildings.”

Liu also applies this vocabulary to busy public spaces. His commercial complex built in Chengdu in Chengdu in West Village fills a whole block with buildings, bike paths, monuments and sidewalks for pedestrians. An exhibition 2020 dedicated to his work At the Savannah College of Art and Design, a model -sized model from West Village contained an example of what the curator translated into contemporary architectural language as “traditional Chinese culture ethic”.

In addition to numerous museums, university buildings and churches, mainly in China, Liu has a panda discharge station The Chengdu research base of the giant panda breedingA popular tourist attraction that is visited by millions of people every year.

In her statement, the Pritzker jury welcomed what she called “awe of culture, history and nature, recorded time and calmed users with familiarity through modern interpretations of classic Chinese architecture”. It quotes as an example A crispy modern building Liu was developed for the Novartis Pharmaceutical Company in Shanghai. It was built in 2014 and summons old Chinese architectural motifs in the use of dramatic balconies. Another who Luyeyuan Stone Skulpture Art Museum From 2002, a traditional Chinese garden with water and old stones emerged in Chengdu.

“I always strive to be like water,” the Laureat wrote in his Pritzker declaration. “To penetrate through a place without carrying your own shape and sitting into the local environment and the location. Over time, the water gradually solidifies and even turns into architecture and perhaps even into the highest form of human spiritual creation. Nevertheless, it still keeps all qualities of this place, both well and bad.”

Perhaps nothing more LIUS summarizes a succinct thing than the “rebirth stones” that he formed after a fatal earthquake in 2008 that destroyed entire villages northwest of Chengdu. In order to help the reconstruction, Liu made bricks with straw and the rubble from the fallen buildings.

“You can see the story in every brick,” he told NPR and added that your production stopped after there were no rubble. “But in the world we can always be used for rebirth stones as long as there are civil wars and earthquakes.”

Copyright 2025 NPR