Pritzker Prize 2025: China’s Liu Jiakun awarded ‘Nobel of architecture’
CNN
Speaking to CNN ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, the founder of one of China’s first private architecture firms reflects on a career designing unpretentious buildings in an era of excess.
Throughout its 46-year history, architecture’s most prestigious prize has often been won by icon-builders: the apparent lone geniuses who imprint their visions, signature-like, on the world. It is emblematic of the industry’s shifting priorities that this year’s Pritzker Prize, often dubbed the “Nobel of architecture,” has gone to a man who actively avoids having a recognizable style. Liu Jiakun, unveiled as 2025’s laureate on Tuesday, has spent much of his four-decade career designing understated academic buildings, museums and public spaces in his home city of Chengdu (and nearby Chongqing), in China’s southwest. His hyper-local and self-admittedly “low-tech” techniques have come at the expense of a distinctive aesthetic. In China’s era of architectural excess, Liu has instead quietly thrived by letting each site — and the history, nature and craft traditions surrounding it — shape his designs, not vice versa. Whether repurposing earthquake debris or creating voids in which native wild flora can flourish, methodology matters more than form. In its citation, the Pritzker Prize jury praised Liu for precisely that: having “a strategy instead of a style.” Explaining his approach to CNN ahead of the announcement, the 68-year-old architect (who admitted to being “a little surprised” by the accolade) said he tried to act “like water.” “I try my best to penetrate and understand the place … then, when the time is right, it will solidify, and the idea of the building will appear,” he said on a video call from Chengdu, adding: “A fixed style is a double-edged sword. It can make others remember you quickly, but it also binds you and makes you lose a certain freedom.” Liu’s firm, Jiakun Architects, has completed over 30 projects — all in China — in almost as many years. The architect has often turned to his country’s history for inspiration. Traditional pavilions informed the flat rooftop eaves of his Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick in Suzhou; the wraparound balconies of the Shanghai campus he designed for Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis evoke a tiered pagoda. But these nods to the past are never for history’s sake alone, Liu said.
