Baku, March 5, AZERTAC

Architecture was not Liu Jiakun’s first choice. According to Financial Times, before it on his list of potential subjects to study came medical sciences (to please his parents), storage management and tannery. Even when he did finally commit to architecture in the 1970s, Liu did not immediately take to it. He signed up, he says, because he thought it was mostly about drawing, and was disappointed to find it was not, quitting the profession soon after to become a novelist. It was only gradually that he drifted back. “Life will find its own way,” he says. Now the 69-year-old Chinese architect has been awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize. His designs are thoughtful, considered and intriguing, and his way of working with salvaged and remade materials, as well as with builders and tradespeople, has marked him out from his contemporaries in China’s vast arena of generic commercial construction. His best known project is West Village (2015) in his home city of Chengdu. A megablock that more closely resembles a kind of urban stadium than a housing development, its design aims to create an almost utopian interior, its deep terraces surrounding a forested, landscaped courtyard with playing fields and parks. A stack of shallow ramps allows residents and visitors to climb the structure slowly and use the top deck as a public space with a view of the city. It became so successful as an attraction that the authorities (always wary of a crowd) closed off public access.

“There is a wisdom in his architecture,” says Tom Pritzker, chair of the Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the $100,000 award, architecture’s most prestigious, “philosophically looking beyond the surface to reveal that history, materials and nature are symbiotic.” Liu’s approach also reveals itself in his smaller, subtler work. Visiting the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, he met a bereaved family and offered to build a memorial for their lost 15-year-old daughter. The simple, grey shed, with its open door and pink interior, is a strikingly personal and emotional work that memorialised not only an individual but all 90,000 victims. Its “everydayness” (his word) is also characteristic. Despite their often large scale, Liu’s works play with ideas about the ordinary, the imperfect and the mundane. At their best, even the biggest works appear self-effacing and attempt to become background rather than monument.

Liu has no single approach. The Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum (2002), housing a collection of Buddhist relics, is, for instance, an elegant intervention in a remote landscape that builds on European influences (notably, to me, Carlo Scarpa). Entered via a bridge over a river, it is an omnivorous piece of architecture, its landscaping modelled after a traditional Chinese garden with complex symbolic and iconographic elements. The Suzhou Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick (2016) is made mostly of the material it celebrates, something between a temple and a cavernous warehouse, with a reinterpretation of a Chinese garden on one side, including water features and an exquisite screened bridge. His Clock Museum of the Cultural Revolution (2007) meanwhile is an odd, conceptual thing. Even brickier than the brick museum, its many niches create a columbarium of clocks for a stopped moment in time, but its monumental exterior seems to echo the socialist realist buildings of the Mao era. It suggests a particularly personal project. Born in 1956, Liu grew up amid the chaos of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He was exiled to the countryside to labour in the fields for three years as part of the “educated youth” programme and only began to study after the reopening of universities in the 1970s. A feeling of uncertainty seems to permeate his work, which is often constructed using what he terms “rebirth brick”. This is not quite reused material (of the kind that his fellow countryman Wang Shu, another Pritzker winner, has employed), but rather something remade, using rubble (from earthquakes or demolition) and cheap additives such as wheat stalks and rough cement. This shift away from the perfection of the modern manufactured product gives his buildings a texture and grain that imbues it with character and a relationship to what came before. It is also very different from the relentless newness of the contemporary urban Chinese cityscape.

Of his own work, the architect says: “I always aspire to be like water — to permeate through a place without carrying a fixed form of my own and to seep into the local environment and the site itself. Over time, the water gradually solidifies, transforming into architecture, and perhaps even into the highest form of human spiritual creation. Yet it still retains all the qualities of that place, both good and bad.”