The annual Pritzker Architecture Prize has been awarded to Liu Jiakun of China, who earned the field’s highest honour for “affirming architecture that celebrates the lives of ordinary citizens”, organisers announced. Liu, 68, becomes the 54th laureate of the prize, considered akin to a Nobel in the field of architecture.

The Pritzker jury citation heralds Liu “for embracing rather than resisting the dystopia/utopia dualism and showing us how architecture can mediate between reality and idealism, for elevating local solutions into universal visions, and for developing a language that describes a socially and environmentally just world.”