Pritzker Prize 2025: Liu Jiakun
On Tuesday 4 March, the Pritztker Prize 2025 was awarded to Chinese architect Liu Jiakun. Born in 1956, he founded Jiakun Architects in 1999 in Chengdu, and works mainly in China. The jury for this 54th edition of the prize praised his humanist and innovative approach, capable of ‘celebrating the everyday life of ordinary citizens’. His work is characterised in particular by the use of local and recycled materials, such as ‘rebirth bricks’, made from the rubble of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. Back in 2015, ‘A’A’ set out this commitment to sustainability and cultural memory in an article published in issue 409 of the magazine on ‘Innovations’. Still relevant, even a decade later.
In 2008, the city of Wenchuan, in the region of Sichuan, was almost completely destroyed by one of the most destructive earthquakes ever recorded in China. Despite the frequent earthquakes in this mountainous region close to the Himalayas, no measures had a chance to be taken to reduce damage. To address the shortage of reconstruction materials, the architect Liu Jiakun reused the rubble. “Piles of ruined buildings needed to be evacuated, and with the harvest underway, we had large quantities of straw available”, he explained with regard to his “rebirth bricks”, those truly recycled bricks.
With the help of local craftsmen, he perfected a semi-industrial manufacturing process, using debris as an aggregate, wheat stalks – usually burned in the summer by the farmers – as an additive, thus reducing the weight and cost of the bricks, while reducing atmospheric pollution, and to bind it all together, cement and sand. A customized machine can produce these light bricks quickly, in the event of an emergency.
The Jiakun Architects office used the “rebirth bricks” on the lower section of the façades, embellished with lighter consolidated traditional bamboo in the upper section, for the Shuijingfang Museum, dedicated to the age-old history of Chinese wine production. Yang Ying, one of the architects, said it is a way of “conveying the essence of Oriental culture using contemporary architectural language”. The project was designed as a tribute to the historical ruins of the Ming and Qing dynasties, as well as to the site of the old distillery and brewing workshops of the 1930s on which it is built. “Our design had to be humble and subtle, without imitating the architecture of our period or hiding it with an over-invasive modern style”, added Yang Ying.
As a tribute to the past and to constant renewal, the “rebirth bricks” express a material and spiritual renaissance. The rampant demolition and reconstruction in current Chinese urbanization produces a huge quantity of waste that could become a source of materials for the large-scale manufacturing of recycled bricks. This would mean that remnants of the past would remain perceptible in the very structure of buildings in this constantly changing landscape.
