The Pritzker 2025 architecture price goes to Liu Jiakun: NPR

The winner of this year Pritzker architecture priceAnnounced Tuesday, is Liu Jiakun.

The prize, created in 1979, is commonly called “the Nobel Prize in Architecture”.

Liu is from Chengdu, in the province of Sichuan in China. He was born there in 1956. His childhood was devoted to traveling the corridors of the large brick hospital where his mother worked as an internist. “Sometimes, when we were young, we went on the roof of the building to see the whole city,” he recalls during a video interview with NPR.

From this high point of view, he said, he could look at neighborhoods still filled with traditional Chinese wooden houses. After obtaining his university degree in 1982, he worked for an architectural firm belonging to the State in Tibet. But he wanted to be a writer.

“At that time, I had (two identities,” said the architect. “One (was) as a worker in the architectural cabinet, and another (was) making my passion, writing.”

Liu spoke of his offices to Chengdu. His translator was her 24 -year -old son Martin. The father and the son wore black frame glasses and black turtleneck sweaters. They also shared a solemn effect which sometimes melted in ironic laughs.

These days, said Liu, he sees similarities between writing – he is the author of several books – and his practice as a designer of buildings and environments built.

“What writing does for me,” he said, “is that it gives me more perspectives. Observations on society and human behavior. There are also vocabularies that are similar in architectural design and in literature. There is always the beginnings and there are always ends. And then there is the highest point and then there are always builds.”

Liu also applies this vocabulary to occupied public spaces. Its West Village sales complex, built in Chengdu in 2015, fills an entire block of buildings, cycle paths, monuments and walkways for pedestrians. A 2020 exhibition dedicated to his work At the Savannah College of Art and Design included a model the size of a West Village piece, as an example of what the conservative described as “translating traditional Chinese cultural ethics in contemporary architectural language”.

In addition to many museums, university buildings and churches, mainly in China, Liu designed a maternity of Panda to The Chengdu research base of giant panda farmingA popular tourist attraction visited by millions of people each year.

The Jury of Pritzker, in his declaration, applauded what he called the “reverence for the culture, history and nature of Liu, time of chronicle and comforting users with modern interpretations of classical Chinese architecture”. As an example, he cited A modern crisp building Liu designed for the Novartis Pharmaceutical Company in Shanghai. Built in 2014, it summons old Chinese architectural motifs in its use of balconies on several levels. Another, the Lyeyuan stone sculpture art museum In Chengdu, from 2002, evokes a traditional Chinese garden, with water and old stones.

“I always aspire to be like water,” wrote the winner in his Pritzker declaration. “Perreat through a place without carrying a fixed shape and infiltrates the local environment and the site itself. Over time, water is gradually solidifying, turning into architecture, and perhaps even into the highest form of human spiritual creation. However, it always retains all the qualities of this place, both well and bad.”

Perhaps nothing sums up the approach of Liu more succinctly than the “renaissance bricks” which he formed after a deadly earthquake in 2008 destroyed whole villages northwest of Chengdu. To help in reconstruction, Liu made bricks, using the straw and the rubble on the left of the fallen buildings.

“You can see the story in each brick,” he told NPR, adding that their production stopped after there was no more debris. “But in the world, as long as there are civil wars and earthquakes, we can always find use for rebirth bricks.”