Pritzker Prize Winner: 'You Have to Provide Poetry'

The annual Pritzker Architecture Prize has been awarded to Liu Jiakun of China, who earned the field's highest honor for "affirming architecture that celebrates the lives of ordinary citizens," organizers announced Tuesday. Liu, 68, becomes the 54th laureate of the prize, considered akin to a Nobel in the field of architecture. In an interview with the AP in his office in Chengdu in China's southwestern Sichuan region, the architect said he had a simple definition of his profession:

• "To simplify, the task of architects is to provide a better living environment for human beings," he said, speaking in Mandarin. "First of all, you do something that is functional. But if it is just like that, it cannot be called architecture. (So) you have to provide poetry."

• Liu is known for creating public areas in highly populated cities where there is little public space, "forging a positive relationship between density and open space," a Pritzker statement said.
• Among his 30 or so projects, which range from academic institutions to commercial buildings to civic spaces, organizers cited in particular his 2015 West Village in Chengdu, which spans a block. The five-story project includes a perimeter of pathways for cyclists and pedestrians around "its own vibrant city of cultural, athletic, recreational, office and business activities within, while allowing the public to view through to the surrounding natural and built environments."

• Liu was born in 1956 in Chengdu and sent at age 17, during the Cultural Revolution, to labor on a farm in the countryside. He has said life felt inconsequential—until he was accepted to architecture school in Chongqing, where he "suddenly realized my own life was important."
• Liu tells the AP he tries to balance his country's artistic and architectural heritage with the realities of modern technology. He also seeks to balance commercial imperatives with civic concerns. "You have to leave the public the space they deserve," he says. "Only in this way can the development of a city be positive and healthy, rather than being completely high-density, where people live in drawers and boxes … without even a place to go and no space for communication."

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