In Sichuan, near the Jianchuan Museum, there is a very simple little house raised with bricks made from the rubble left by the earthquake that, in 2008, ended with the lives of 90,000 people and swept a good part of the province. That little house, with two waters, like the one that any child would draw, is the favorite work of Liu Jiakun (Chengdu, China, 1956), the new winner of the Pritzker, the most important international architecture award at the international level, which has been announced this Tuesday. And he is named after a girl, Hu Huishan, who, with 15 years, died crushed by the debris of the institute where he studied when the earthquake made his city tremble.
Belonging to the considered group of the Chinese architectural avant -garde – with Dong Yugan, Liu Xiaodong or Wang Shu (already awarded with the Pritzker in 2012) -, Jiakun went to Sichuan to give help as an architect. He observed the large amount of debris and decided to use those materials for brick manufacturing (re-birth bricks) that he began using in his projects thereafter. He also spent time talking to people to understand what he needed. That was how he comforted Huishan’s parents. And he was able to anticipate that a memorial to the life of a 15 -year -old girl was necessary, not just to honor her memory. Also to, in the future, stop, force us to think and remember. To warn about the transience and fragility of life.
That house -shaped memorial is a pink space from the ground to the roof because that color was the favorite of the teenager. It is apparently empty – you can contain the Hu desktop, its volleyball rackets, some of her drawings and the backpack that the young woman took to the institute. That idea of rescuing memory as wealth and as a warning is present throughout the work of this architect. Also in its vital attitude, which connects architecture with philosophy, writing and, above all, with a humanity that modernity seemed to neglect.
His work – gathering materials, rescuing traditions, updating the memory of the places and reconsidering the relationship with nature and public space – is not nostalgic but humanistic. The Hu Memorial served this author of just 30 architectural projects to strengthen his ideas defending memory. He encouraged him about his consideration of crafts above, or at least of the hand of technology, and reinforced it in his defense of the everyday, day to day, which, in architecture, represents the public space.
Thus, seven years after building the memorial, in Chengdu, Jiakun lifted the West Village, a building-Barrio (or town) that not only replaces a golf course, but also questions the idea that the density-necessary for us to all and so that the cities are sustainable-should translate into skyscraper. That is what has happened in newly created Chinese cities or in transformed cities to welcome those who worked the field. In the West Village, on the other hand, basketball courts live with homes, nature, shops and public space. It is … what had been a town. Or a good neighborhood.
Son of a family of doctors, Liu Jiakun grew up accompanying his mother – the internist military – for the halls of the Chengdu Hospital. That medical center of the People’s Republic of China was originally a Christian hospital. And from that change of names Jiakun learned the importance of memory and coexistence. Both concepts humanize their work. Also a teenage decision: to question the family tradition and study architecture – “because she believed that she could draw,” he said. And the subsequent doubt about whether to project buildings or write novels. He tried both. The protagonist of his book Project Moon He is an architect who proposes the construction of a utopian town, capable of welcoming and giving good life to people without separating them from nature or alienating them. The book is the opposite of The ManantialAyn Rand’s famous novel-starring an incomprehensive architect-artist, that concept that continues to perpetuate the film The Brutalist-. In Jiakun’s novel the architect does not succeed. Or yes? Manages to change the stereotype. The book was censored in China and had to wait 15 years until it was published.
Meanwhile, Jiakun began to build. As of 1999, when he opened his own study in Chengdu, he began to raise cultural buildings – like sculpture or design schools at the Shachuan Faculty of Fine Arts. Those schools were followed by a museum challenge, such as Luyeyuan’s sculpture or watches in Jianchuan that is, in reality, a place to save the memory of the past to prevent it from being razed by the wake of the cultural revolution.
To question many of the decisions of that revolution led him to manufacture bricks not only with the ruins and debris from earthquakes, but also with the own destruction that his country was suffering with the construction of the large and dense cities. These new bricks used them in the pavements and buildings walls such as the Shuijingfang Museum in its city, Chengdu.
And it was that perpetual questioning that led him to his most transformative project. Precisely, to propose if the way of life that was offered as a future-the urban agglomeration-signed the West Village of Chengdu, the-Barrio that allows the coexistence of sports tracks, housing and vegetation signed. It is that defense of the memory and quality of everyday life that converts the simple architecture of Liu Jiakun into a monumental achievement.