At 17, Liu Jiakun was sent to labor in the countryside as part of China’s “re-education” efforts during the Cultural Revolution.
“I didn’t see a clear future for me — a lot of things were quite meaningless,” Liu said through a translator (his son, Martin) in a recent phone interview from his office in Chengdu, China. “I thought at the time that life was inconsequential.”
Eventually, Liu, now 68, found meaning in architecture, a pursuit that has earned him the profession’s highest honor: the Pritzker Prize.
Having founded his own practice, Jiakun Architects, in his native Chengdu in 1999, Liu has built more than 30 projects in China — including academic buildings, cultural institutions and civic spaces. He also designed the inaugural Serpentine Pavilion Beijing in 2018 and has been featured in Venice Biennales.
His work is not flashy or full of flourishes. Instead, the architect said, he aims to honor existing conditions, to use local materials that are “regular, contemporary, cheap and local” and to elevate the human spirit.
“Through an outstanding body of work of deep coherence and constant quality, Liu Jiakun imagines and constructs new worlds, free from any aesthetic or stylistic constraint,” the jury said in its citation announcing the award on Tuesday. “Instead of a style, he has developed a strategy that never relies on a recurring method but rather on evaluating the specific characteristics and requirements of each project differently. That is to say, Liu Jiakun takes present realities and handles them to the point of offering a whole new scenario of daily life.”
His so-called rebirth brick, was composed of the rubble of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, mixed with wheat stalks and cement.
He constructed a simple, poignant tribute to a 15-year-old girl lost in that earthquake, under the collapsed Beichuan Middle School: “Memorial to Hu Huishan,” on the grounds of the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Chengdu. The structure resembles a relief tent and inside, the pink walls feature some of her belongings — a backpack, a fringed scarf.
“It’s a way to comfort her parents,” Liu said. “The memorial expresses personal emotion but also it’s a collective memory.”
Even Liu’s largest public projects are similarly modest. His 2015 “West Village” in Chengdu, a courtyard complex of cultural, athletic, recreational, office and business activities rises five stories and wraps around an entire block, though it is visually understated and low-tech in contrast to the neighborhood’s higher buildings. The perimeter is open yet enclosed, with pathways for cyclists and pedestrians, enveloping a mini village and providing views of the surrounding environment.
With grasses poking through holes in the bricks and Indigenous bamboo groves providing areas of shade, the project celebrates “the vitality of ‘everydayness’,” wrote one critic in 2017, “which he sees as ‘the main content and primal pleasure of human life’.”
Liu’s Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum (Chengdu, 2002), home to a private collection of Buddhist figures and relics, is modeled after a traditional Chinese garden, featuring water and ancient stones as well as rough-hewed sand plastering handiwork. His renovation of Tianbao Cave District of Erlang Town (Luzhou, China, 2021), consisting of several liquor-storage caves, is nestled in the lush cliffside of Tianbao Mountain.
“In a world that tends to create endless dull peripheries, he has found a way to build places that are a building, infrastructure, landscape and public space at the same time,” Alejandro Aravena, chairman of the Pritzker jury, said in a statement. “His work may offer impactful clues on how to confront the challenges of urbanization.”
Born in Chengdu in 1956, Liu said he was drawn to architecture because he liked “drawing pictures.” He graduated from what was then the Chongqing Institute of Architecture and Engineering in 1982 and began working for the state-owned Chengdu Architectural Design and Research Institute.
In 1984, he volunteered to temporarily relocate to Nagqu, Tibet — among the highest regions on Earth — because, “my major strength of the time seemed to be my fear of nothing, and, in addition, my painting and writing skills,” he said in statements provided by the Pritzker.
During that time, Liu was an architect by day and an author by night, nearly abandoning his career for writing. In 1993, he attended the solo architectural exhibition of a former classmate, Tang Hua, at the Shanghai Art Museum. He realized he could “also have personal expression through architecture,” he said in the interview, which “allows me to get into people’s lives and have a deeper understanding of it.”
Liu quietly melds his buildings into their environments. His Shuijingfang Museum (2013), which focuses on the history of Chinese baijiu liquor, preserved the 600-year-old distillery site and the scale of the surrounding low-level residences. His Museum of Clocks — containing a series of clocks that signify the end of the Cultural Revolution — features a large circular structure punctured by a skylight and an interior band of photographs.
For the 2015 Venice Biennale — “With the wind 2015 — It’s your call” — Liu created an arcade formed by fishing rods lodged into a base of rough logs.
“I wanted my architecture to coexist with nature and also able to express the characteristics of the local environment,” he said in the interview. “I want my architecture to be public and also to better people’s lives.”