Liu Jiakun: The 2025 Pritzker Prize Winner Who Turned Architecture Into Humanity

Liu Jiakun: The Radical Pragmatist Who Rewrote Chinese Architecture

China’s Quiet Revolution in Architecture

The early 2000s were a turbulent, electric moment in China’s architectural landscape. After two decades of explosive urbanization—cities rising overnight, skylines rewritten every month—China reached an inflection point. The era of quantity was beginning to give way to the era of quality.

Something fundamental changed.

Suddenly, the conversation wasn’t about “how fast can we build,” but “how responsibly can we build?”
Urban design matured as a discipline. Sustainability moved from theory to mandate.
National projects like Beijing’s Olympic Park and the Grand Theatre redefined scale.
Pilot experiments—like mining-restoration landscapes at the Garden Expo—became testbeds for future ecological cities.
And a new generation of architects emerged who refused spectacle and embraced meaning.

In this tectonic shift stood Liu Jiakun—quiet, stubborn, radically human.

He did not shape skylines.
He shaped souls.

While global “starchitects” of the time were producing extravagant geometries and technological exhibitions, Jiakun was doing something profoundly subversive:
He built architecture that served, healed, remembered, and belonged.

His philosophy was almost scandalously simple for a country racing toward futurism:

Architecture should serve, not dictate.

And in that simplicity lies the entire revolution.

Urbanization Without Memory

The China of the early 2000s was a world in warp-speed transition.

Millions migrated from rural provinces into cities. Old districts were razed. New towers erupted. Redevelopment replaced conservation across nearly every major city.

The result?

Displacement of long-settled communities
Erosion of architectural heritage
Environmental stress, pollution, and degraded ecosystems
Growing urban loneliness
And a cultural anxiety: What happens to identity when a city forgets its past?

Governments began speaking in new terms—eco-cities, green infrastructure, public-health-oriented design. But policy alone could not heal the emotional and social wounds of a city in metamorphosis.

Architecture had to become a balm.

And that is exactly where Liu Jiakun entered the story—not as a grand theorist, but as a radical pragmatist who refused to turn architecture into spectacle.

To him, the real site of architecture was not land.
It was the human heart.

Liu Jiakun’s Core Thesis: “Intervening, But Not Interfering”

Liu Jiakun is not an architect who imposes form.
He is an architect who listens.

His guiding principle is deceptively soft:

“First you need to be a person, then an architect.”

He believes architecture must intervene—yes—but without interference. Without violence. Without erasing history, culture, memory, or the natural environment.

Instead of a signature visual style, he uses a signature method:

Research the soul of a place
Understand its people
Honor its history
Use local materials
Empower local workers
Build simply
Build honestly
Build humbly
Build meaningfully

His architecture grows like a plant: organically, respectfully, sturdily, responding to its environment rather than overpowering it.

In a time when architecture was becoming increasingly digital, glossy, and industrial, Jiakun offered something radically counter-cultural:

A return to humanism.

A return to memory.

A return to craft.

When Architecture Helps You Heal

The “Rebirth Bricks” and the Hu Huishan Memorial (2009)

After the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, China needed buildings.
Liu Jiakun built dignity.

He launched the Rebirth Brick initiative—transforming earthquake debris into usable bricks. Not just as a low-cost solution, but as a philosophical act:

“If the rubble becomes architecture, then memory becomes home.”

The most haunting expression of this was the Hu Huishan Memorial, dedicated to a 15-year-old girl who died in the earthquake.

A pitched, plaster-coated structure resembling a relief tent.
Inside—visible only through a peephole—a preserved pink bedroom.

It is small.It is quiet.It is overwhelming.

The memorial doesn’t glorify tragedy.It protects grief.

And in doing so, it reveals the essence of Jiakun’s architecture:
Buildings are not objects.They are vessels for human feeling.

11 Icons That Show His Evolution

1. Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum (2002, Chengdu)

Perhaps his most poetic work.

A museum woven into a bamboo forest, built with béton brut concrete walls that become silent companions to ancient Buddhist stone relics.
Light enters not from skylights, but from the spaces between volumes—a deliberate choice that creates a meditative rhythm.

This is architecture not as exhibition, but as silence.

2. Department of Sculpture, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (2004)

Rust-toned metal panels echo the neighboring factory buildings.
A protruding angular volume maximizes space—a practical solution lifted into sculptural form.

3. Design Department, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (2006)

Seven brick buildings, each with unique roof typologies—vaulted, butterfly, pitched—quietly referencing the industrial landscape around them.

4. Museum of Clocks, Jianchuan Museum Cluster (2007)

A trio of geometric volumes.
One circular hall cut open to the sky—a perfect metaphor for time entering space.

5. Hu Huishan Memorial (2009)

Grief, preserved with architectural tenderness.

6. Shuijingfang Museum (2013)

Old wooden structures meet new concrete additions.
A courtyard becomes the heart of the museum—half-shadow, half-memory.

7. Novartis Shanghai (2014)

Cantilevered balconies recall ancient Chinese watchtowers.
A vertical atrium ties the entire building into one breathing organism.

8. West Village, Chengdu (2015)

A masterpiece of social urbanism.

A full city block turned into a porous, accessible, deeply humane community center.
Ramps weave cultural, recreational, and workspace programs into a sponge-like system of movement.

Here, density is not the opposite of openness.
It is the generator of life.

9. Suzhou Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick (2016)

Built around archeological ruins.
Concrete columns raise the building like a protective arm around history.

10. Songyang Culture Neighborhood (2020)

An act of urban acupuncture.
A spiritual site reborn with new museum, hotel, café, bookstore—connected by delicate steel corridors.

11. Renovation of Tianbao Cave District (2021)

A cultural center where a mirrored exhibition hall reflects the mountains.
A cantilevered hall overlooks a green coastal landscape.

Architecture and geography folded into one harmonious gesture.

The Pritzker Prize Citation (2025): Architecture That Reveals the Human Condition

On March 4, 2025, the Pritzker Prize announced its laureate:

Liu Jiakun.

The citation said:

“In a global context where architecture is struggling to respond to rapidly evolving social and environmental challenges, Liu Jiakun offers convincing answers that celebrate the everyday lives of people and their communal identities.”

This is more than an award.
It is an ideological shift.

The jury didn’t honor form.
They honored care.
They honored memory.
They honored architecture as emotional intelligence.

And for the first time in years, the Pritzker felt less like a prize for buildings and more like a prize for humanity.

Understanding Liu Jiakun Through Neuroarchitecture

While not a neuroscientist, Jiakun intuitively builds with neuroarchitectural principles:

Spatial calm
Emotional grounding
Sensory clarity
Cultural memory
Co-presence and community

His spaces lower cortisol levels through material honesty.
They evoke safety through proportion and light.
They activate belonging through cultural cues.
And they stimulate memory through texture and narrative.

This raises a profound question:

Is the Pritzker quietly signaling the global mainstreaming of neuroarchitecture?

And if yes—Jiakun may be the philosopher-architect who opened that door.

His Early Life: The Architect Who Almost Wasn’t

Born in 1956 in Chengdu, Liu Jiakun never intended to be an architect.

He wanted to be a painter.
A writer.
A thinker.

Architecture, he believed, was simply “another way to draw.”

He studied at Chongqing Institute of Architecture & Engineering, graduated in 1982, tried working in an architectural academy—and hated it. He left.
He spent a decade in Tibet and Xinjiang painting, meditating, writing, living as a nomadic artist.

He returned to architecture only after visiting an exhibition in 1993.

That moment changed everything.

In 1999, he founded Jiakun Architects, where he began building a body of work that would redefine China’s architectural conscience.

He designed not from ego or ambition, but from an almost monastic humility.

His quote says everything:

“Once I understand what the workers can do, then I can design my building.”

Architecture not from the mind.
But from the hands.

Economic Sensibility: Sustainability Through Low-Tech Genius

Jiakun is often called “low-tech,” but that is a misunderstanding.

He is high-wisdom.

His construction approach is rooted in:

local materials
low-cost methods
minimal waste
vernacular craftsmanship
community participation
cultural continuity

Projects like the Pibosang Residential Development show how cost-efficient design can still be deeply dignified.

Fly-ash bricks, soil-cement blocks, bamboo, rat-trap bond construction—all these reduce cost by 25–40% while creating housing that feels warm and human.

This is affordability with grace.

What Defines Liu Jiakun?

Humanism.

Not as sentimentality. Not as charity. But as a philosophical stance:

Architecture is a vessel for human expression.

It must carry memories.
It must nurture community.
It must live lightly on the earth.
It must never forget the people who inhabit it.

In a world seduced by steel curves, parametric screens, and algorithmic abstractions, Liu Jiakun offers a counterpoint:

Architecture can still be simple.
Simple, and yet deeply, endlessly expressive.

Closing Reflection: Why Liu Jiakun Matters Now

Today, cities are again at an inflection point—climate stress, loneliness epidemics, material waste, homelessness, ecological collapse. Architects everywhere are asking:

Can architecture still care?
Can it still heal?
Can it still belong?
Can it still tell the truth?

Liu Jiakun answers all of these with three quiet words:

“Intervening, not interfering.”

His works are a reminder that the future of architecture will not be defined by spectacle, but by sincerity. Not by technology, but by tenderness. Not by form, but by feeling.

In a world that often builds too much and understands too little, Liu Jiakun teaches us the most important lesson of all:

Architecture is not about buildings.

It is about being human.

If this is the architecture of care, Bjarke Ingels is the architecture of audacity. If Liu brings humanity to architecture, Bjarke Ingels shows how bold imagination builds tomorrow—read his story.- The Impossible Made Inevitable: Bjarke Ingels and the New Shape of the World