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.

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       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.”

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