In a move that champions quiet integrity over monumental spectacle, the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury has named Chinese architect Liu Jiakun as its 2025 laureate. The decision is a powerful affirmation of an architecture rooted in place, memory, and the human condition, moving the spotlight away from globalized icons and toward a more thoughtful, context-driven practice.
Based in Chengdu, Liu Jiakun has built a career on what he calls a "low-tech strategy," favoring simple, often local materials and techniques to create spaces of extraordinary emotional depth. His work resists easy categorization, existing at the intersection of contemporary design, traditional craftsmanship, and a deep-seated respect for the stories embedded in a landscape.
Building as Storytelling
For Liu, a building is not merely a shelter but a vessel for life and a narrator of history. He often works with reclaimed materials—old bricks, salvaged wood, and rubble—imbuing his new structures with the ghosts of what came before. This philosophy is a direct response to the rapid, often destructive, urbanization that has swept across China, offering an alternative path that values continuity and reflection over erasure.
His approach is less about creating a signature style and more about asking the right questions: What does this place need? What stories does this land hold? How can a structure serve its community with humility and grace?
"I am interested in the ordinary," Liu once stated in an interview. "I believe architecture should be rooted in the reality of life. It should be a container of life, with a close relationship to nature and the environment."
A Masterpiece Carved from the Earth: The Luyeyuan Museum
Perhaps no project better encapsulates Liu's vision than the Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum. Rather than imposing a structure onto the landscape, Liu carved the museum out of it. The building is a winding, semi-subterranean journey, a sequence of spaces that unfold like a scroll painting.
Using rough-cast concrete and stone excavated directly from the site, the museum's walls feel as if they have grown from the earth itself. Narrow paths guide visitors through galleries that are sometimes enclosed and sometimes open to the sky, blurring the boundaries between inside and out, architecture and nature. The experience is not one of observing art in a white box, but of embarking on a pilgrimage where the building, the sculptures, and the surrounding bamboo forest become a single, indivisible entity.
The Luyeyuan Museum is a testament to the idea that the most powerful architectural statements are often the most restrained. It doesn't shout for attention; it invites you to listen to the whispers of the place.
The 2025 Pritzker Prize for Liu Jiakun is more than an award for a single architect. It is a celebration of an architecture of patience, of listening, and of profound respect for the world we build upon. It signals that true vision lies not in inventing the new, but in artfully revealing the beauty that is already there.