Liu Jiakun Receives the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize | Hacker News Reader

Liu Jiakun Receives the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize

pritzkerprize.com

53 pointspseudolus39 comments

Solid choice, Pritzker loves recognizing blending modernism and regional/vernacular. Pritzker is essentially lifetime achievement prize, have to examine entire body of work. When it comes to "developing" countries like PRC, obviously 50 year career will have some "dud" looking buildings constructed during period where country was poor as fuck. Part of the charm is appreciating how architects negotiate these conditions. Every few years Pritzker will recognize such works, i.e. Shu (china), Doshi (india), Kere (burkina faso), Rocha (brazil), the OG Barragan (mexico). IMO there's "better" Chinese architects pushing modern Chinese architecture, but they're all pretty young studios and won't get their due for decades.

Would you mind sharing those people/firms?

Off top of my head: Vector, Atelier FCJZ, Neri&Hu, Atelier Deshaus, Urbanus, Tao+C, crossboundaries, ZAO/standardarchitecture, MAD (don't care for them).

I'm not very good with architect names, but TLDR PRC iterating through their generations of western trained young architects -> domestic trained + western trained -> domestically trained talent pipeline. There's more and more solid work now, especially last 15 years when real money was being thrown at building (and crackdown on western starchitects). Also not saying they're better than Liu persay, but they're good glimpse at new gen portfolios in era where architects not limited to poverty resources. Some of portfolio is still pretty bill paying boring modernism, but every once in a while they'll throw out a nice local "critical regionalism" (i.e. opposite of generic internationalism) project that makes on go, yup that's what a nicely constructed "Chinese" building for xyz region should look like.

Browsing through the "selected works", some of the photos don't do him justice. There is some interesting stuff but also some drab apartment housing, and even a shed ?

The shed is a relief tent that is a memorial to an earthquake where they were used.

Maoist Apartment blocks and hideous concrete monstrosities win you Architecture Prizes? Wtf is wrong with out society. Complete disdain for actual beauty that can add to human flourishing...

They have their beauty as objects of art, but certainly not as a place that I would enjoy occupying or being around. Brutalist architecture with a Chinese flair.

Most of it doesn't look brutalist to me. See this for example: https://www.pritzkerprize.com/sites/default/files/styles/max...

It looks like a normal house just without paint.

I bet you live in SF and find the Tenderloin 'pleasant' and 'not so bad if you don't go out at night or alone' too.

I looked up Tenderloin and it all looks quite normal traditional architecture? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderloin,_San_Francisco#/med...

Whats the problem there?

Ah yes when I'm surrounded by active drug users and the mentally ill my first thought is to architecture as well.

And why do you think that matters to this topic at all? I don't live in SF I don't know about its crime rate. How on earth is the architectural quality in any way shape of form related to crime rates? Why even bring up such a ridiculous unrelated point?

Its about aesthetics and if you can't figure that out then its obvious why you find bleak soviet apartment blocks appealing and concrete bomb shelters.

That location in SF then isn't an example of brutalism or soviet aesthetics either if I go by the photos I found on the internet. It was a totally irrelevant example.

I don't live there so I can't comment on level of crime. But architecturally I find no fault here.

The Pritzker Prize leans modernist. If you prefer classical architecture, check out the Driehaus Prize [1]. The 2025 laureate is Liam O'Connor.

[1] https://driehausprize.nd.edu

Leans might be an understatement. But thanks, some faith has been restored in humanity.

Whats monstrous about it?

These look very nice and livable. https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/liu-jiakun#laureate-...

The first one looks very homely. Good greenery, good sense of shades, cool gray concrete textures. ( https://www.pritzkerprize.com/sites/default/files/styles/max... )

This one doesn't look Maoist to me, looks very like a traditional hut. https://www.pritzkerprize.com/sites/default/files/styles/max...

>The first one looks very homely. Good greenery, good sense of shades, cool gray concrete textures. ( https://www.pritzkerprize.com/sites/default/files/styles/max... )

It looks like poorly poured concrete...

>This one doesn't look Maoist to me, looks very like a traditional hut. https://www.pritzkerprize.com/sites/default/files/styles/max...

It looks like a bomb shelter...

https://www.theplan.it/images/stories/gallery91318/design-de...

That is objectively one of the bleakest pictures I have ever seen.

This is supposed to be International Architecture Award Winning Quality?

https://i.insider.com/5d409233100a247279644dd4?width=1000&fo...

Who knew that half the buildings in Mirny, Siberia were considered works of art worthy of International Architecture Prizes lol.

Are you from a country where houses are made of wood?

Brick and concrete is the common house building material in many parts of the world.

The Siberian buildings look much different from the examples you gave. They look like generic rectangular apartment blocks.

Whereas this for example looks not much different from the old European tile roof houses https://www.theplan.it/images/stories/gallery91318/design-de...

I genuinely weep for the soul of anyone who sees this: https://www.theplan.it/images/stories/gallery91318/design-de... and thinks "Ah yes this is worthy of an International Award in Architecture"

The "poorly poured" looks like board formed concrete, which IMO looks better than a single form. It's also for a stone sculpture museum, so fits the theme?

I don't know where you're getting that. I opened the link with a heart full of skepticism, ready to scoff at some hideous, inhumane modern weirdness, but found instead pleasant environments, reasonable choices, and graceful use of practical materials. I doubt I'll ever go to China, but if I did, I can imagine enjoying a visit to some of those places.

Ah, of course: inhuman concrete and strange angles and colors.

My theory with all the high art that the “man in the street” sees as weird or childish garbage is this: if youre a critic or on the inside you’ve seen it all before and dissected it in such detail and tried everything that the only thing that can make you feel anything anymore is electric shocks right to your scrotum while listening to dubstep on the back of a birthing donkey. And so all the movies and art and architecture become just that, and you continue your retreat from the mainstream into your increasingly strange world. Because the fact is, good appealing art has pretty much been discovered but where’s the fun (or profit) in that?

You are seriously mistaking your personal preference for a universal human trait. Many of these buildings are very homely feeling.

You probably might also come from a country where houses are built of wood. Wood isn't a common building material outside Europe and North America. Concrete and brick are most common.

Regardless of material, these examples are hideous.

> You are seriously mistaking your personal preference for a universal human trait. Many of these buildings are very homely feeling.

Which you determined how exactly? Or are your tastes universal?

I don't think it's super fruitful to fight opinions with opinions at least.

By most common factors of homeliness: greenery, shade, cool concrete/stone walls (concrete hatred might even be the minority viewpoint worldwide. Wood is not a common building material outside USA/Canada and Europe). Its not like those large glass walled open plan structures. The interior is secluded and hidden and so on.

So you picked traits you feel are associated with that label and checked how much they apply?

... so still subjectively?

Yes as are all artistic opinions. But in fact I can have hard objective data in this, if you look up the normalcy of concrete as a building material worldwide. By this standard wood is weird and concrete is the normal thing. In any case there is no knee jerk aversion to the material. Perhaps its a thing in former communist countries and countries which defined themselves as hating these countries to see concrete as "cold".

... which then matters only to the extent that any given characterization makes it so (which is again subjective). It makes the discussion more sophisticated, but nonetheless still just a clashing of personal preferences.

I really don't see value in this. If it wasn't treated as a debate but as an exploration, an open ended discussion, then sure. But as it stands, this is just pointless. Literally "I don't like it vs. I do", just more elaborate, with a hint of mutual mislead of the other into thinking it's winnable.

My comment is much less dismissive and ridiculous than the top comment I am replying to. I didn't say I hate wood or find it impossible people would like wood. If you wanted to look at it from the point of view of a debate vs exploration mine was closer to the exploration end.

It was, true. Oh well, let's see how they and others respond to it all.

In architecture I almost never find anything really "objectionable" to the point of disgust. So to me I find it difficult to understand how some people can find themselves to get so worked up over architecture. At most the examples of "ugly" architecture cited by various people make me feel bland/unfeeling not disgusted.

I think it's not really the architecture they got ticked off about, but the praise vs. the architecture.

To be more specific, it's not the "designs" that are their issue I don't think, but the extremeness of the gap between what they regard as their own taste or think of as common sense taste vs. what they can see here, and the extreme praise (an award) the latter is receiving despite that. It must be a baffling, cold shower like experience to them.

I've had this with some TV shows, where I'd find them obnoxiously overrated, and their sheer mention would get pretty intense reactions out of me. Even though the shows were alright, just nowhere near what people represented them as.

This can be generalized a bit, where if we concede that taste is subjective, then recognitions like these as a whole will come across as weird, if not counterproductive. I don't think that's the angle they were going for though. An analog I can think of from my own experiences is my distaste towards praising historical figures in literature (of all kinds, so incl. science and philosophy literature). It robs people of their own ambitions, I think.

It could be but I was also speaking in a more general sense about having seen some people who seem literally disgusted about some architecture completely outside of any awards.

Ah I see. I do think some designs (architecture or otherwise) look pretty bad, even offensive (not in the culture war sense, but in the this hurts to look at sense), but there are some subject matters where my lowest is also just indifference. So I'd say this is a "to each their own" type of thing too.

Today I learned that in British English, "homely" is a positive trait when referring to a place.

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