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Pensioners take their evening stroll on an elevated walkway, surrounded by lush thickets of bamboo, as a game of five-a-side football kicks off on a sunken pitch below. Around them, forming a huge C-shaped courtyard, rises a five-storey stack of streets in the sky, where signs advertise everything from yoga and dance studios to skincare clinics, barbecue restaurants and computer programming classes for kids. A long, sloping ramp connects the different levels, knitting the structure together in a zigzag promenade that culminates on the roof, framing views out over the sprawling Chinese megacity of Chengdu.
This multi-levelled landscape of leisure, culture and commerce, known as West Village, is the work of architect Liu Jiakun, who has been named as the recipient of this year’s Pritzker prize, the world’s highest accolade in architecture. His is a name that few outside China will know, and yet within the country he is respected as one of the masters of his generation. Over the last four decades he has quietly built an exemplary body of work, mostly in the south-west province of Sichuan, ranging from museums and universities to public spaces and urban plans. Each of his projects channels the spirit of its place, forming carefully crafted backdrops to everyday life – free from the bombast and swagger of much contemporary architecture in China.
“I became an architect by accident,” says Liu, speaking through a translator in his studio in Chengdu. Like the man, his office is unassuming, housed in a nondescript tenement building where he also runs a small cafe and gallery. “My teacher told me that the subject would allow me to practise drawing, but I didn’t know more than that when I applied for university.”
He is only the second Chinese citizen to receive the Pritzker prize, following Wang Shu in 2012, which is hardly surprising, given that private practice was outlawed in China until the 1990s. The jury praised Liu’s ability to use “Chinese tradition without nostalgia, but as a springboard for innovation”, creating “new architecture that is at once a historical record, a piece of infrastructure, a landscape and a remarkable public space.”
Born in 1956, on the eve of the great Chinese famine, Liu spent much of his childhood at the hospital where his mother worked. He was sent to the countryside for three years during the Cultural Revolution to work the land, and applied to university when the institutions reopened in the late 1970s. On graduation in 1982, he worked briefly at the state-run Chengdu Architectural Design and Research Institute, but found the experience dispiriting. “It was a day job,” he says, “but my real interest was in writing.”
He left architecture and spent the next decade in Tibet and China’s western province of Xinjiang, where he practised painting, writing and meditation, producing several works of fiction. His dystopian 1999 novel, Bright Moonlight Plan, followed an architect’s futile struggle to build an ideal new town, taking inspiration from Le Corbusier’s tyrannical Radiant City plan (which would have bulldozed the centre of Paris) and the Soviet and Chinese communist revolutions.
“There is an intrinsic relationship between architecture and literature,” says Liu. “Both involve the observation of society, and acute attention to human behaviour.” Both also require patience: it took 15 years to see his novel published in China.
Liu finally returned to architecture in his 40s, setting up his practice in 1999, after his interest was rekindled by visiting an exhibition with an old classmate. Private architecture practice was still a novelty in China, and Liu provocatively named his studio after his given name, Jiakun – a bold, personal contrast to the anonymity of the state-owned design institutes. “It seemed like a simple choice to me,” he says, “but people thought it was a pretentious, daring move at the time.”
His first building, completed in 2002, was the small Luyeyuan Museum, for a private collection of ancient Buddhist sculptures, set by a river in a bamboo forest on the outskirts of Chengdu. Reached via a meandering path through the forest, which rises to a bridge across a lotus pond, it has the air of encountering a lost ruin, its austere, raw concrete volumes sliced open to channel natural light across the exhibits. His series of buildings for the campus of the Sichuan fine arts institute, completed in 2004, have a similarly monolithic quality, standing as a cluster of chiselled redbrick volumes on a hilltop, their pitched and butterfly roofs giving them the look of a rocky outcrop.
Liu received national attention following the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, which killed around 70,000 people, when he utilised some of the rubble, mixed with local wheat fibre and cement, to produce what he called “rebirth bricks”. He says: “When I visited the disaster site, I saw mountains of debris. They had to rebuild everything very quickly, and I realised the materials were right there. It was cheaper, more efficient, and stronger than using new bricks.” More than just recycling, these bricks were a poetic metaphor for the rebirth of both the material and the spiritual rebirth of the community at a time of national mourning.
They became a signature of his work, most notably at the Shuijingfang Museum in Chengdu, an atmospheric extension to a historic baijiu distillery, completed in 2013. In the production of the fiery white spirit, workers shovel fermenting grains into great steaming heaps inside Liu’s concrete-framed warehouses, filling the air with a sweet alcoholic scent, while daylight and fresh air filter in through clever “dragon’s mouth” shafts in the roof, designed to mimic similar features in the existing timber-framed buildings. The rugged grey bricks are offset by concrete imprinted with woven bamboo mats, used to line the formwork, adding a finer human grain to the structure.
“It’s a cheap material that you can find anywhere in Sichuan,” says Liu. “I always start by finding out what the local construction workers can do, and then I design with that in mind.”
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He used the same bamboo mat technique at the West Village complex, completed in 2015, where raw steel reinforcement bars also provide an economic solution to balustrades, in keeping with his tough, workmanlike aesthetic. Economies were needed on this gigantic project, which covers an entire city block, stretching over 200 metres long. “I think of it like a big Sichuan hotpot,” says Liu, “combining every aspect of city life.” Recalling the plot of his novel, it was an attempt to build his own kind of urban utopia, with sports facilities, restaurants, galleries and all the things you might find on a high street. “I wanted to bring the life of the street all the way up the building,” he says.
The project was a victim of its own success. After 9,000 people decided to promenade along the rooftop walkway one clear day in 2016, the authorities closed off the ramp. It was still blocked off during my visit in 2023, sadly leaving many of the upper units vacant. But Liu says it reopened again last year and life is gradually returning.
Other notable projects include an enigmatic clock museum in Chengdu, which culminates in a momentous circular courtyard, evoking a sundial, and a brick museum in Suzhou. More recently, he has completed the revitalisation of a historic temple neighbourhood in Lishui, and the renovation of a dramatic cliffside cave complex in Luzhou – both of which stitch together historic fabric with slender steel and bamboo pavilions.
Back in his studio, Liu’s small team is now busy working on their biggest project yet: the transformation of a former steelworks into a park, in the eastern city of Hangzhou, rambling across a 45-hectare site. Watched over by the three beloved office cats – Huahua (Mixed), Duidui (Cross-eyed), Xiao San (Little Third), who appear, Godzilla-like, in various drawings and models – the architects refine the design of additions and walkways that will thread their way through the industrial site. Like much of Jiakun Architects’ work, it will be a subtle combination of old and new, using careful interventions to reveal the complex layers of history, allowing the place’s stories to be told, without shouting at full volume.
“I always aspire to be like water,” says Liu, “to permeate through a place without carrying a fixed form of my own and to seep into the local environment and the site itself. Over time, the water gradually solidifies, transforming into architecture, and perhaps even into the highest form of human spiritual creation. Yet it still retains all the qualities of that place, both good and bad.”
