Latest news with #Chinese-ness
The Star
18-07-2025
- Business
- The Star
Manus AI's ‘de-China' playbook is a trap
WHEN Chinese startup Manus previewed an artificial intelligence (AI) agent earlier this year, it went mega-viral. It came on the heels of DeepSeek, when global excitement over China's AI breakthroughs was at a fever pitch, and nobody wanted to miss out on the next surprise hit. Now, Manus is doing everything it can to sever any ties to the mainland. It relocated its headquarters to Singapore, and its three co-founders have made the move abroad as well. Butterfly Effect, the company behind Manus, reportedly eliminated all its China-based jobs last week. It has also scrubbed content from domestic social media platforms Weibo and Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote), despite maintaining an active presence on X. Users in China trying to access the site this week were met with the message that it's 'not available in your region,' a departure from a previous memo stating that the Chinese version was under development. It's the choice these tech firms are forced to make in the current geopolitical climate: stay in the hyper-competitive domestic market or go for more lucrative growth overseas. You can't have both. Moving abroad means going through the arduous process of trying to 'de-China' the company's origins. It's a shame given this background is what drove so much hype about Manus in the first place. Chinese firms have also traditionally had an edge in consumer tech, with access to a vast pool of affordable engineering talent and a hardworking culture. Plus, dubious identity rebrands almost never work. Manus' decision to recast as a Singapore company follows the furore that emerged in the United States after prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist (VC) firm Benchmark (an early backer of the likes of eBay Inc and Uber Technologies Inc) announced it was leading a US$75mil funding round in Butterfly Effect. Fellow VCs accused Benchmark of 'investing in your enemy' and equated it to backing Russian efforts during the space race. The plans have also come under US Treasury Department scrutiny over new rules related to investments in certain Chinese technology. It will be very hard for Manus to ever rid the China label from its story, especially after all the attention it received. Co-founder Ji Yichao was on the cover of Forbes China more than a decade ago, as one of the 30 under 30 entrepreneurs in the country. State-backed mouthpieces have also celebrated Manus's rise, so trying to cleanse its Chinese-ness risks domestic backlash. It's not the first time this has happened. ByteDance Ltd's TikTok has gone to great pains to rebrand as an American and Singaporean company and assuage Washington's fears about its Beijing origins. But none of this stopped the United States from passing a law last year requiring the parent company to divest from the app that doesn't even operate in the mainland, or be banned due to perceived national security concerns. This doesn't bode well for Manus. The AI sector has become a lightning rod for China hawks in the United States, who view any consumer-facing application using the tech from its geopolitical nemesis as a threat. AI video startup HeyGen Inc garnered investment and a raft of US customers after making the move from China, yet was still singled out by lawmakers over potential ties to the Communist Party. Its co-founder said it's been 'disappointing' to see his heritage treated as something he should 'be ashamed of.' Wrapped up in national security worries is more than a hint of xenophobia. Targeting consumer tech firms based on the national origins of their founders is an ineffective strategy. US concerns about potential threats that data could leak to China or that the CCP could influence algorithms should implement more comprehensive rules to mitigate these risks. When it comes to buzzy new technology like the Manus AI agent, industry-wide standards are overdue. Tools that are designed to allow software to take on increasingly complex tasks on their own carry unique risks, including who is liable when things go awry and how much control should be ceded to machines. Global policymakers should address these concerns regardless of where the AI agent comes from. Icing out the best and brightest tech minds risks leaving Silicon Valley blind to innovation happening elsewhere. It's in America's interest to do more to support these founders by bringing their talents and breakthroughs to the United States. —Bloomberg Catherine Thorbecke is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia tech. The views expressed here are the writer's own.
CNN
04-03-2025
- Business
- CNN
Pritzker Prize 2025: China's Liu Jiakun awarded ‘Nobel of architecture'
Throughout its 46-year history, architecture's most prestigious prize has often been won by icon-builders: the apparent lone geniuses who imprint their visions, signature-like, on the world. It is emblematic of the industry's shifting priorities that this year's Pritzker Prize, often dubbed the 'Nobel of architecture,' has gone to a man who actively avoids having a recognizable style. Liu Jiakun, unveiled as 2025's laureate on Tuesday, has spent much of his four-decade career designing understated academic buildings, museums and public spaces in his home city of Chengdu (and nearby Chongqing), in China's southwest. His hyper-local and self-admittedly 'low-tech' techniques have come at the expense of a distinctive aesthetic. In China's era of architectural excess, Liu has instead quietly thrived by letting each site — and the history, nature and craft traditions surrounding it — shape his designs, not vice versa. Whether repurposing earthquake debris or creating voids in which native wild flora can flourish, methodology matters more than form. In its citation, the Pritzker Prize jury praised Liu for precisely that: having 'a strategy instead of a style.' Explaining his approach to CNN ahead of the announcement, the 68-year-old architect (who admitted to being 'a little surprised' by the accolade) said he tried to act 'like water.' 'I try my best to penetrate and understand the place … then, when the time is right, it will solidify, and the idea of the building will appear,' he said on a video call from Chengdu, adding: 'A fixed style is a double-edged sword. It can make others remember you quickly, but it also binds you and makes you lose a certain freedom.' Related article These buildings would have transformed skylines, but they were never built Liu's firm, Jiakun Architects, has completed over 30 projects — all in China — in almost as many years. The architect has often turned to his country's history for inspiration. Traditional pavilions informed the flat rooftop eaves of his Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick in Suzhou; the wraparound balconies of the Shanghai campus he designed for Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis evoke a tiered pagoda. But these nods to the past are never for history's sake alone, Liu said. 'I focus on the themes that tradition focuses on, rather than the forms that tradition presents,' he explained. In other words, elements of traditional architecture must be reinterpreted for functional, modern use, not used as tributes to a bygone time. Indeed, China's cities are inundated with examples of the opposite, whereby curved roofs are added to otherwise characterless structures in the pursuit of an ill-defined 'Chinese-ness.' 'Traditional forms … are the results of the culture, technology and people's philosophy of survival at that time,' Liu explained. 'If we focus on the superficial results, we will stop at that time. But if we focus on the themes that tradition has always focused on, but use current technology and methods, then there's a continuation of tradition.' Born in 1956, three years before China's (and arguably the world's) most devastating famine, Liu's childhood revolved around the Chengdu hospital where his mother worked. He demonstrated an early aptitude for art and literature, though, like many of his generation, his teenage years were interrupted by the Cultural Revolution when he was sent to the countryside as part of Mao Zedong's 'educated youth' program. Liu's career has, however, neatly coincided with the post-Mao period — one that has seen architecture freed from state control and socialist ideals. He accepted a place at Chongqing's Institute of Architecture and Engineering in 1978, two years after the former Chinese Communist Party leader's death, and graduated amid the reform-era policies that opened China's centrally planned economy to free-market forces. This period heralded huge changes for architecture. Key foreign texts and journals from the field entered the country and became more widely available to students and academics. Government-controlled design institutes, like the one Liu worked at in his early career, were finally permitted to charge fees, having previously only served the state. Yet, in the fast-moving atmosphere of 1980s China, Liu still felt architecture 'lagged behind.' 'When I graduated, it seemed that architects had nothing to do,' he said. 'The economy had not developed, and ideas had not become active.' Related article Why turning cities into 'sponges' could help fight flooding By the early 1990s, Liu — who was, at the time, also pursuing writing — considered quitting the profession altogether. He changed his mind after seeing an exhibition by a former classmate, the architect Tang Hua, that he says inspired him to escape the shadow cast by their sector's state-controlled past. He established Jiakun Architects, one of the country's very first private practices, in 1999. The firm's early projects laid a blueprint for understanding Liu's ethos. His Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum, which opened in Chengdu in 2002, sits serenely in a bamboo forest, its rough concrete and gray shale existing in harmony with the stone artifacts housed within. The recesses and overhangs of his rust-colored Department of Sculpture building, completed for the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing two years later, are themselves acts of sculpture. At the Museum of Clocks, also in Chengdu, textural red brickwork alludes more to the area's humble past than a gleaming future. As architecture in China became increasingly bold and bombastic in the 2010s (a trend that eventually led the country's cabinet, the State Council, to call for the end of 'oversized, xenocentric, weird' buildings), Liu's output remained quiet and unpretentious — even when the scale of his commissions grew. By Liu's own admission, his firm was always too small to tackle the skyscrapers or mixed-use mega-projects that redrew China's skylines. But as his oeuvre came to encompass corporate real estate and urban regeneration, his motivations still lay elsewhere. 'I am not very interested in the tendency of making taller and bigger buildings,' he said. 'I am not necessarily consciously resisting it. I am just not very interested.' Instead, Liu seeks to redress some of the ills generated by his country's rampant urbanization. 'China's cities are developing very fast, so they face two major challenges,' he explained. 'One is the relationship with public space, and the other is the relationship with nature. I think my works focus on these two aspects.' Symbiosis between nature and architecture plays out at Liu's ambitious West Village, an inner-city Chengdu block transformed into a courtyard but at a neighborhood scale. Sloping pathways transport cyclists and pedestrians around a five-story structure that encircles soccer pitches and lush greenery, a park reimagined vertically. This huge public gesture is accompanied by many tiny ones. For paving, Liu used bricks perforated with holes and filled with soil, allowing grass to sprout through the middle. Related article The scenic garden that became China's secretive seat of power A few miles away, the Shuijingfang Museum has been constructed using similarly thoughtful building blocks: 'Rebirth Bricks.' Created by Liu's firm using rubble from the Wenchuan earthquake, which devastated the Sichuan region in 2008, the reconstructed bricks (made by mixing the rubble with wheat stalks and cement) have been employed in several of his projects. It's an innovation that typifies why Liu is celebrated for practicing a kind of everyday architecture in which local context reigns large. But does this mean the architect's vision will always be restricted to China, the country he most intimately understands? Despite designing the first overseas pavilion for London's Serpentine Gallery in Beijing in 2018 and lecturing at institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and London's Royal Academy of Arts, Liu has never completed a project abroad. Asked whether he would relish the prospect of a prestigious international commission, an opportunity winning the Pritzker Prize will surely present, Liu said his approach could indeed be adapted to foreign contexts with sufficient research and preparation. 'From the perspective of method and methodology, there is actually no problem in doing it abroad,' he said, adding: 'As long as I am fully familiar with the place, I think (my) set of methods is completely applicable.' CNN's Hassan Tayir contributed to this story.
CNN
04-03-2025
- Business
- CNN
Pritzker Prize 2025: China's Liu Jiakun awarded ‘Nobel of architecture'
Throughout its 46-year history, architecture's most prestigious prize has often been won by icon-builders: the apparent lone geniuses who imprint their visions, signature-like, on the world. It is emblematic of the industry's shifting priorities that this year's Pritzker Prize, often dubbed the 'Nobel of architecture,' has gone to a man who actively avoids having a recognizable style. Liu Jiakun, unveiled as 2025's laureate on Tuesday, has spent much of his four-decade career designing understated academic buildings, museums and public spaces in his home city of Chengdu (and nearby Chongqing), in China's southwest. His hyper-local and self-admittedly 'low-tech' techniques have come at the expense of a distinctive aesthetic. In China's era of architectural excess, Liu has instead quietly thrived by letting each site — and the history, nature and craft traditions surrounding it — shape his designs, not vice versa. Whether repurposing earthquake debris or creating voids in which native wild flora can flourish, methodology matters more than form. In its citation, the Pritzker Prize jury praised Liu for precisely that: having 'a strategy instead of a style.' Explaining his approach to CNN ahead of the announcement, the 68-year-old architect (who admitted to being 'a little surprised' by the accolade) said he tried to act 'like water.' 'I try my best to penetrate and understand the place … then, when the time is right, it will solidify, and the idea of the building will appear,' he said on a video call from Chengdu, adding: 'A fixed style is a double-edged sword. It can make others remember you quickly, but it also binds you and makes you lose a certain freedom.' Related article These buildings would have transformed skylines, but they were never built Liu's firm, Jiakun Architects, has completed over 30 projects — all in China — in almost as many years. The architect has often turned to his country's history for inspiration. Traditional pavilions informed the flat rooftop eaves of his Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick in Suzhou; the wraparound balconies of the Shanghai campus he designed for Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis evoke a tiered pagoda. But these nods to the past are never for history's sake alone, Liu said. 'I focus on the themes that tradition focuses on, rather than the forms that tradition presents,' he explained. In other words, elements of traditional architecture must be reinterpreted for functional, modern use, not used as tributes to a bygone time. Indeed, China's cities are inundated with examples of the opposite, whereby curved roofs are added to otherwise characterless structures in the pursuit of an ill-defined 'Chinese-ness.' 'Traditional forms … are the results of the culture, technology and people's philosophy of survival at that time,' Liu explained. 'If we focus on the superficial results, we will stop at that time. But if we focus on the themes that tradition has always focused on, but use current technology and methods, then there's a continuation of tradition.' Born in 1956, three years before China's (and arguably the world's) most devastating famine, Liu's childhood revolved around the Chengdu hospital where his mother worked. He demonstrated an early aptitude for art and literature, though, like many of his generation, his teenage years were interrupted by the Cultural Revolution when he was sent to the countryside as part of Mao Zedong's 'educated youth' program. Liu's career has, however, neatly coincided with the post-Mao period — one that has seen architecture freed from state control and socialist ideals. He accepted a place at Chongqing's Institute of Architecture and Engineering in 1978, two years after the former Chinese Communist Party leader's death, and graduated amid the reform-era policies that opened China's centrally planned economy to free-market forces. This period heralded huge changes for architecture. Key foreign texts and journals from the field entered the country and became more widely available to students and academics. Government-controlled design institutes, like the one Liu worked at in his early career, were finally permitted to charge fees, having previously only served the state. Yet, in the fast-moving atmosphere of 1980s China, Liu still felt architecture 'lagged behind.' 'When I graduated, it seemed that architects had nothing to do,' he said. 'The economy had not developed, and ideas had not become active.' Related article Why turning cities into 'sponges' could help fight flooding By the early 1990s, Liu — who was, at the time, also pursuing writing — considered quitting the profession altogether. He changed his mind after seeing an exhibition by a former classmate, the architect Tang Hua, that he says inspired him to escape the shadow cast by their sector's state-controlled past. He established Jiakun Architects, one of the country's very first private practices, in 1999. The firm's early projects laid a blueprint for understanding Liu's ethos. His Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum, which opened in Chengdu in 2002, sits serenely in a bamboo forest, its rough concrete and gray shale existing in harmony with the stone artifacts housed within. The recesses and overhangs of his rust-colored Department of Sculpture building, completed for the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing two years later, are themselves acts of sculpture. At the Museum of Clocks, also in Chengdu, textural red brickwork alludes more to the area's humble past than a gleaming future. As architecture in China became increasingly bold and bombastic in the 2010s (a trend that eventually led the country's cabinet, the State Council, to call for the end of 'oversized, xenocentric, weird' buildings), Liu's output remained quiet and unpretentious — even when the scale of his commissions grew. By Liu's own admission, his firm was always too small to tackle the skyscrapers or mixed-use mega-projects that redrew China's skylines. But as his oeuvre came to encompass corporate real estate and urban regeneration, his motivations still lay elsewhere. 'I am not very interested in the tendency of making taller and bigger buildings,' he said. 'I am not necessarily consciously resisting it. I am just not very interested.' Instead, Liu seeks to redress some of the ills generated by his country's rampant urbanization. 'China's cities are developing very fast, so they face two major challenges,' he explained. 'One is the relationship with public space, and the other is the relationship with nature. I think my works focus on these two aspects.' Symbiosis between nature and architecture plays out at Liu's ambitious West Village, an inner-city Chengdu block transformed into a courtyard but at a neighborhood scale. Sloping pathways transport cyclists and pedestrians around a five-story structure that encircles soccer pitches and lush greenery, a park reimagined vertically. This huge public gesture is accompanied by many tiny ones. For paving, Liu used bricks perforated with holes and filled with soil, allowing grass to sprout through the middle. Related article The scenic garden that became China's secretive seat of power A few miles away, the Shuijingfang Museum has been constructed using similarly thoughtful building blocks: 'Rebirth Bricks.' Created by Liu's firm using rubble from the Wenchuan earthquake, which devastated the Sichuan region in 2008, the reconstructed bricks (made by mixing the rubble with wheat stalks and cement) have been employed in several of his projects. It's an innovation that typifies why Liu is celebrated for practicing a kind of everyday architecture in which local context reigns large. But does this mean the architect's vision will always be restricted to China, the country he most intimately understands? Despite designing the first overseas pavilion for London's Serpentine Gallery in Beijing in 2018 and lecturing at institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and London's Royal Academy of Arts, Liu has never completed a project abroad. Asked whether he would relish the prospect of a prestigious international commission, an opportunity winning the Pritzker Prize will surely present, Liu said his approach could indeed be adapted to foreign contexts with sufficient research and preparation. 'From the perspective of method and methodology, there is actually no problem in doing it abroad,' he said, adding: 'As long as I am fully familiar with the place, I think (my) set of methods is completely applicable.' CNN's Hassan Tayir contributed to this story.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Pritzker Prize 2025: China's Liu Jiakun awarded ‘Nobel of architecture'
Throughout its 46-year history, architecture's most prestigious prize has often been won by icon-builders: the apparent lone geniuses who imprint their visions, signature-like, on the world. It is emblematic of the industry's shifting priorities that this year's Pritzker Prize, often dubbed the 'Nobel of architecture,' has gone to a man who actively avoids having a recognizable style. Liu Jiakun, unveiled as 2025's laureate on Tuesday, has spent much of his four-decade career designing understated academic buildings, museums and public spaces in his home city of Chengdu (and nearby Chongqing), in China's southwest. His hyper-local and self-admittedly 'low-tech' techniques have come at the expense of a distinctive aesthetic. In China's era of architectural excess, Liu has instead quietly thrived by letting each site — and the history, nature and craft traditions surrounding it — shape his designs, not vice versa. Whether repurposing earthquake debris or creating voids in which native wild flora can flourish, methodology matters more than form. In its citation, the Pritzker Prize jury praised Liu for precisely that: having 'a strategy instead of a style.' Explaining his approach to CNN ahead of the announcement, the 68-year-old architect (who admitted to being 'a little surprised' by the accolade) said he tried to act 'like water.' 'I try my best to penetrate and understand the place … then, when the time is right, it will solidify, and the idea of the building will appear,' he said on a video call from Chengdu, adding: 'A fixed style is a double-edged sword. It can make others remember you quickly, but it also binds you and makes you lose a certain freedom.' Liu's firm, Jiakun Architects, has completed over 30 projects — all in China — in almost as many years. The architect has often turned to his country's history for inspiration. Traditional pavilions informed the flat rooftop eaves of his Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick in Suzhou; the wraparound balconies of the Shanghai campus he designed for Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis evoke a tiered pagoda. But these nods to the past are never for history's sake alone, Liu said. 'I focus on the themes that tradition focuses on, rather than the forms that tradition presents,' he explained. In other words, elements of traditional architecture must be reinterpreted for functional, modern use, not used as tributes to a bygone time. Indeed, China's cities are inundated with examples of the opposite, whereby curved roofs are added to otherwise characterless structures in the pursuit of an ill-defined 'Chinese-ness.' 'Traditional forms … are the results of the culture, technology and people's philosophy of survival at that time,' Liu explained. 'If we focus on the superficial results, we will stop at that time. But if we focus on the themes that tradition has always focused on, but use current technology and methods, then there's a continuation of tradition.' Born in 1956, three years before China's (and arguably the world's) most devastating famine, Liu's childhood revolved around the Chengdu hospital where his mother worked. He demonstrated an early aptitude for art and literature, though, like many of his generation, his teenage years were interrupted by the Cultural Revolution when he was sent to the countryside as part of Mao Zedong's 'educated youth' program. Liu's career has, however, neatly coincided with the post-Mao period — one that has seen architecture freed from state control and socialist ideals. He accepted a place at Chongqing's Institute of Architecture and Engineering in 1978, two years after the former Chinese Communist Party leader's death, and graduated amid the reform-era policies that opened China's centrally planned economy to free-market forces. This period heralded huge changes for architecture. Key foreign texts and journals from the field entered the country and became more widely available to students and academics. Government-controlled design institutes, like the one Liu worked at in his early career, were finally permitted to charge fees, having previously only served the state. Yet, in the fast-moving atmosphere of 1980s China, Liu still felt architecture 'lagged behind.' 'When I graduated, it seemed that architects had nothing to do,' he said. 'The economy had not developed, and ideas had not become active.' By the early 1990s, Liu — who was, at the time, also pursuing writing — considered quitting the profession altogether. He changed his mind after seeing an exhibition by a former classmate, the architect Tang Hua, that he says inspired him to escape the shadow cast by their sector's state-controlled past. He established Jiakun Architects, one of the country's very first private practices, in 1999. The firm's early projects laid a blueprint for understanding Liu's ethos. His Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum, which opened in Chengdu in 2002, sits serenely in a bamboo forest, its rough concrete and gray shale existing in harmony with the stone artifacts housed within. The recesses and overhangs of his rust-colored Department of Sculpture building, completed for the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing two years later, are themselves acts of sculpture. At the Museum of Clocks, also in Chengdu, textural red brickwork alludes more to the area's humble past than a gleaming future. As architecture in China became increasingly bold and bombastic in the 2010s (a trend that eventually led the country's cabinet, the State Council, to call for the end of 'oversized, xenocentric, weird' buildings), Liu's output remained quiet and unpretentious — even when the scale of his commissions grew. By Liu's own admission, his firm was always too small to tackle the skyscrapers or mixed-use mega-projects that redrew China's skylines. But as his oeuvre came to encompass corporate real estate and urban regeneration, his motivations still lay elsewhere. 'I am not very interested in the tendency of making taller and bigger buildings,' he said. 'I am not necessarily consciously resisting it. I am just not very interested.' Instead, Liu seeks to redress some of the ills generated by his country's rampant urbanization. 'China's cities are developing very fast, so they face two major challenges,' he explained. 'One is the relationship with public space, and the other is the relationship with nature. I think my works focus on these two aspects.' Symbiosis between nature and architecture plays out at Liu's ambitious West Village, an inner-city Chengdu block transformed into a courtyard but at a neighborhood scale. Sloping pathways transport cyclists and pedestrians around a five-story structure that encircles soccer pitches and lush greenery, a park reimagined vertically. This huge public gesture is accompanied by many tiny ones. For paving, Liu used bricks perforated with holes and filled with soil, allowing grass to sprout through the middle. A few miles away, the Shuijingfang Museum has been constructed using similarly thoughtful building blocks: 'Rebirth Bricks.' Created by Liu's firm using rubble from the Wenchuan earthquake, which devastated the Sichuan region in 2008, the reconstructed bricks (made by mixing the rubble with wheat stalks and cement) have been employed in several of his projects. It's an innovation that typifies why Liu is celebrated for practicing a kind of everyday architecture in which local context reigns large. But does this mean the architect's vision will always be restricted to China, the country he most intimately understands? Despite designing the first overseas pavilion for London's Serpentine Gallery in Beijing in 2018 and lecturing at institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and London's Royal Academy of Arts, Liu has never completed a project abroad. Asked whether he would relish the prospect of a prestigious international commission, an opportunity winning the Pritzker Prize will surely present, Liu said his approach could indeed be adapted to foreign contexts with sufficient research and preparation. 'From the perspective of method and methodology, there is actually no problem in doing it abroad,' he said, adding: 'As long as I am fully familiar with the place, I think (my) set of methods is completely applicable.' CNN's Hassan Tayir contributed to this story.
CNN
04-03-2025
- Business
- CNN
Pritzker Prize 2025: China's Liu Jiakun awarded ‘Nobel of architecture'
Throughout its 46-year history, architecture's most prestigious prize has often been won by icon-builders: the apparent lone geniuses who imprint their visions, signature-like, on the world. It is emblematic of the industry's shifting priorities that this year's Pritzker Prize, often dubbed the 'Nobel of architecture,' has gone to a man who actively avoids having a recognizable style. Liu Jiakun, unveiled as 2025's laureate on Tuesday, has spent much of his four-decade career designing understated academic buildings, museums and public spaces in his home city of Chengdu (and nearby Chongqing), in China's southwest. His hyper-local and self-admittedly 'low-tech' techniques have come at the expense of a distinctive aesthetic. In China's era of architectural excess, Liu has instead quietly thrived by letting each site — and the history, nature and craft traditions surrounding it — shape his designs, not vice versa. Whether repurposing earthquake debris or creating voids in which native wild flora can flourish, methodology matters more than form. In its citation, the Pritzker Prize jury praised Liu for precisely that: having 'a strategy instead of a style.' Explaining his approach to CNN ahead of the announcement, the 68-year-old architect (who admitted to being 'a little surprised' by the accolade) said he tried to act 'like water.' 'I try my best to penetrate and understand the place … then, when the time is right, it will solidify, and the idea of the building will appear,' he said on a video call from Chengdu, adding: 'A fixed style is a double-edged sword. It can make others remember you quickly, but it also binds you and makes you lose a certain freedom.' Related article These buildings would have transformed skylines, but they were never built Liu's firm, Jiakun Architects, has completed over 30 projects — all in China — in almost as many years. The architect has often turned to his country's history for inspiration. Traditional pavilions informed the flat rooftop eaves of his Museum of Imperial Kiln Brick in Suzhou; the wraparound balconies of the Shanghai campus he designed for Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis evoke a tiered pagoda. But these nods to the past are never for history's sake alone, Liu said. 'I focus on the themes that tradition focuses on, rather than the forms that tradition presents,' he explained. In other words, elements of traditional architecture must be reinterpreted for functional, modern use, not used as tributes to a bygone time. Indeed, China's cities are inundated with examples of the opposite, whereby curved roofs are added to otherwise characterless structures in the pursuit of an ill-defined 'Chinese-ness.' 'Traditional forms … are the results of the culture, technology and people's philosophy of survival at that time,' Liu explained. 'If we focus on the superficial results, we will stop at that time. But if we focus on the themes that tradition has always focused on, but use current technology and methods, then there's a continuation of tradition.' Born in 1956, three years before China's (and arguably the world's) most devastating famine, Liu's childhood revolved around the Chengdu hospital where his mother worked. He demonstrated an early aptitude for art and literature, though, like many of his generation, his teenage years were interrupted by the Cultural Revolution when he was sent to the countryside as part of Mao Zedong's 'educated youth' program. Liu's career has, however, neatly coincided with the post-Mao period — one that has seen architecture freed from state control and socialist ideals. He accepted a place at Chongqing's Institute of Architecture and Engineering in 1978, two years after the former Chinese Communist Party leader's death, and graduated amid the reform-era policies that opened China's centrally planned economy to free-market forces. This period heralded huge changes for architecture. Key foreign texts and journals from the field entered the country and became more widely available to students and academics. Government-controlled design institutes, like the one Liu worked at in his early career, were finally permitted to charge fees, having previously only served the state. Yet, in the fast-moving atmosphere of 1980s China, Liu still felt architecture 'lagged behind.' 'When I graduated, it seemed that architects had nothing to do,' he said. 'The economy had not developed, and ideas had not become active.' Related article Why turning cities into 'sponges' could help fight flooding By the early 1990s, Liu — who was, at the time, also pursuing writing — considered quitting the profession altogether. He changed his mind after seeing an exhibition by a former classmate, the architect Tang Hua, that he says inspired him to escape the shadow cast by their sector's state-controlled past. He established Jiakun Architects, one of the country's very first private practices, in 1999. The firm's early projects laid a blueprint for understanding Liu's ethos. His Luyeyuan Stone Sculpture Art Museum, which opened in Chengdu in 2002, sits serenely in a bamboo forest, its rough concrete and gray shale existing in harmony with the stone artifacts housed within. The recesses and overhangs of his rust-colored Department of Sculpture building, completed for the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing two years later, are themselves acts of sculpture. At the Museum of Clocks, also in Chengdu, textural red brickwork alludes more to the area's humble past than a gleaming future. As architecture in China became increasingly bold and bombastic in the 2010s (a trend that eventually led the country's cabinet, the State Council, to call for the end of 'oversized, xenocentric, weird' buildings), Liu's output remained quiet and unpretentious — even when the scale of his commissions grew. By Liu's own admission, his firm was always too small to tackle the skyscrapers or mixed-use mega-projects that redrew China's skylines. But as his oeuvre came to encompass corporate real estate and urban regeneration, his motivations still lay elsewhere. 'I am not very interested in the tendency of making taller and bigger buildings,' he said. 'I am not necessarily consciously resisting it. I am just not very interested.' Instead, Liu seeks to redress some of the ills generated by his country's rampant urbanization. 'China's cities are developing very fast, so they face two major challenges,' he explained. 'One is the relationship with public space, and the other is the relationship with nature. I think my works focus on these two aspects.' Symbiosis between nature and architecture plays out at Liu's ambitious West Village, an inner-city Chengdu block transformed into a courtyard but at a neighborhood scale. Sloping pathways transport cyclists and pedestrians around a five-story structure that encircles soccer pitches and lush greenery, a park reimagined vertically. This huge public gesture is accompanied by many tiny ones. For paving, Liu used bricks perforated with holes and filled with soil, allowing grass to sprout through the middle. Related article The scenic garden that became China's secretive seat of power A few miles away, the Shuijingfang Museum has been constructed using similarly thoughtful building blocks: 'Rebirth Bricks.' Created by Liu's firm using rubble from the Wenchuan earthquake, which devastated the Sichuan region in 2008, the reconstructed bricks (made by mixing the rubble with wheat stalks and cement) have been employed in several of his projects. It's an innovation that typifies why Liu is celebrated for practicing a kind of everyday architecture in which local context reigns large. But does this mean the architect's vision will always be restricted to China, the country he most intimately understands? Despite designing the first overseas pavilion for London's Serpentine Gallery in Beijing in 2018 and lecturing at institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and London's Royal Academy of Arts, Liu has never completed a project abroad. Asked whether he would relish the prospect of a prestigious international commission, an opportunity winning the Pritzker Prize will surely present, Liu said his approach could indeed be adapted to foreign contexts with sufficient research and preparation. 'From the perspective of method and methodology, there is actually no problem in doing it abroad,' he said, adding: 'As long as I am fully familiar with the place, I think (my) set of methods is completely applicable.' CNN's Hassan Tayir contributed to this story.
