Following Wang Shu in in 2012, Liu is the second architect from China to be lauded with the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and he has dedicated his practice to designing in and for his native country. His major projects include the Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum (2002) in Chengdu, China, which intertwines a traditional garden and the brut concrete-walled gallery building; the Department of Sculpture at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (2004) in Chongqing, China, a contextually sensitive rust-colored building whose upper levels are angled outward to ensure maximum light and air for academic occupants; and the block-wide commercial courtyard West Village (2015) in Chengdu, China, which features a community sports field at its center. The Suzhou Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick (2016) in Suzhou, China, is a flat-roofed modern take on the traditional material that it exhibits; and the renovation of the cliffside Tianbao Cave District of Erlang Town (2021) in Luzhou, China, calls upon traditional Chinese pavilion architecture to both reveal and hide the new structures accommodating visitors to the world’s largest liquor storage caves.
“In a world that tends to create endless dull peripheries, he has found a way to build places that are a building, infrastructure, landscape, and public space at the same time,” said the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury chair and 2016 laureate Alejandro Aravena of Liu’s oeuvre. “His work may offer impactful clues on how to confront the challenges of urbanization in an era of rapidly growing cities.”
In addition to using architecture to create community, protect aesthetic context and heritage, and integrate landscape into rural and urban surroundings, Liu’s projects create poetic interaction between light, shadow, and materials. For the latter, he prioritizes sourcing local goods that support traditional craft and seeks those with texture and visible imperfections to add character to his buildings. Shopfronts at the aforementioned West Village complex, for example, are embedded with what the architect calls “rebirth bricks,” a fortified material he invented by mixing rubble from the ruins of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake with cement and local wheat fiber. Stronger and more economical than typical brick, they are also ingrained with cultural significance. In 2009, in Chengdu, China, just 50 miles from the deadly 7.9-magnitude earthquake’s epicenter, Liu previously used the material to create his smallest work, an intimate Memorial to Hu Huishan. Designed to honor a teenage girl who died during the natural disaster, it takes the shape of a refugee tent and is as much an ode to an individual memory as it is to the collective.
