At 17, Liu Jiakun was despatched to labor within the countryside as a part of China’s “re-education” efforts through the Cultural Revolution.
“I didn’t see a transparent future for me — numerous issues have been fairly meaningless,” Liu mentioned by means of a translator (his son, Martin) in a latest cellphone interview from his workplace in Chengdu, China. “I assumed on the time that life was inconsequential.”
Ultimately, Liu, now 68, discovered which means in structure, a pursuit that has earned him the career’s highest honor: the Pritzker Prize.
Having based his personal observe, Jiakun Architects, in his native Chengdu in 1999, Liu has constructed greater than 30 initiatives in China — together with educational buildings, cultural establishments and civic areas. He additionally designed the inaugural Serpentine Pavilion Beijing in 2018 and has been featured in Venice Biennales.
His work will not be flashy or stuffed with thrives. As a substitute, the architect mentioned, he goals to honor current circumstances, to make use of native supplies which can be “common, up to date, low-cost and native” and to raise the human spirit.
“Via an excellent physique of labor of deep coherence and fixed high quality, Liu Jiakun imagines and constructs new worlds, free from any aesthetic or stylistic constraint,” the jury mentioned in its quotation saying the award on Tuesday. “As a substitute of a mode, he has developed a method that by no means depends on a recurring methodology however fairly on evaluating the precise traits and necessities of every venture in a different way. That’s to say, Liu Jiakun takes current realities and handles them to the purpose of providing an entire new state of affairs of each day life.”
