Chinese Liu Jiakun, architect of everyday life, winner of the Pritzker Prize

"In a global context where architecture is struggling to find adequate answers to rapidly evolving social and environmental challenges, Liu Jiakun has provided compelling responses that also celebrate people's daily lives," wrote the jury of the prize awarded to the architect, born in 1956 in Chengdu, in a statement.

"Architecture should reveal something, it should abstract, distill and make visible the intrinsic qualities of local people," Liu Jiakun said in the statement.

In four decades of career, the 54th winner of the prestigious award has built a body of work that skillfully plays on contrasts and through which he "proposes an assertive architecture that celebrates the life of ordinary citizens", insists the organization.

"Cities tend to separate functions, but Liu Jiakun takes the opposite approach and strikes a delicate balance to integrate all dimensions of urban life," commented jury chair Alejandro Aravena, himself a 2016 winner.

"In a world that tends to create endless and boring peripheries, he found a way to build places that are at once a building, an infrastructure, a landscape and a public space," his colleague appreciated.

Liu Jiakun, who still lives and works in his hometown, has designed more than thirty infrastructures throughout China, ranging from cultural centers to museums and shopping malls. Among his emblematic works, the Clock Museum in Chengdu, a large circular structure crossed by a skylight that illuminates an interior strip of photographs.

Poetry

His buildings rarely stand out in the landscape in which they are integrated and are not avant-garde technological feats, which is what makes his work so interesting, notes the Pritzker jury, which praises an "honest" architecture and the "sincerity" of raw materials. In short, a work that prefers "lasting imperfections" to the ephemeral extraordinary.

The Chinese architect favors "local raw materials that support the economy and the environment," he notes.

"Through an exceptional work, of profound coherence and constant quality, Liu Jiakun imagines and constructs new worlds, freed from any aesthetic or stylistic constraints", congratulates the jury, for which it adds "common sense and wisdom" to the "architect's toolbox".

He succeeds the Japanese Riken Yamamoto as winner of the Pritzker Prize - which will be formally presented to him in the spring in the United Arab Emirates.

The prize, considered the "Nobel" of architecture, has been awarded every year since 1979 and has already crowned the greatest names in this art, such as Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, ​​Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel.

A poet in his spare time, author of several works, Liu Jiakun believes that architecture has "the power to shape human behavior and create atmospheres, offering a feeling of serenity and poetry."

"Writing short stories and practicing architecture are distinct art forms and I did not deliberately choose to combine the two," he told the institution that now places him at the top of his art. "However (...) there is an intrinsic link between the two in my work, like the narrative quality and the search for poetry in my constructions."