Chinese architect Liu Jiakun receives 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize

The annual Pritzker Architecture Prize has been awarded to Liu Jiakun of China, who earned the field's highest honour for "affirming architecture that celebrates the lives of ordinary citizens," organizers announced recently.

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Liu, 68, becomes the 54th laureate of the prize, considered akin to a Nobel in the field of architecture. In an interview with The Associated Press in his office in Chengdu in China's southwestern Sichuan region, the architect said he had a simple definition of his profession: “To simplify, the task of architects is to provide a better living environment for human beings,” he said, speaking in Mandarin. “First of all, you do something that is functional. But if it is just like that, it cannot be called architecture. (So) you have to provide poetry.” Liu is known for creating public areas in highly populated cities where there is little public space, “forging a positive relationship between density and open space,” a Pritzker statement said.

The architect “upholds the transcendent power of the built environment through the harmonizing of cultural, historical, emotional and social dimensions, using architecture to forge community, inspire compassion and elevate the human spirit,” the statement said. Among his 30 or so projects, which range from academic institutions to commercial buildings to civic spaces, organizers cited in particular his 2015 West Village in Chengdu, which spans a block. The five-story project includes a perimeter of pathways for cyclists and pedestrians around “its own vibrant city of cultural, athletic, recreational, office and business activities within, while allowing the public to view through to the surrounding natural and built environments.”