He turns steelworks into parks and makes ‘rebirth bricks’ from earthquake rubble. As the novelist, meditator and ‘accidental architect’ wins the Pritzker prize, we look at the masterful temples, caves and public spaces of this one-man antidote to Chinese bombast

Pensioners take their evening stroll on an elevated walkway, surrounded by lush thickets of bamboo, as a game of five-a-side football kicks off on a sunken pitch below. Around them, forming a huge C-shaped courtyard, rises a five-storey stack of streets in the sky, where signs advertise everything from yoga and dance studios to skincare clinics, barbecue restaurants and computer programming classes for kids. A long, sloping ramp connects the different levels, knitting the structure together in a zigzag promenade that culminates on the roof, framing views out over the sprawling Chinese megacity of Chengdu.

This multi-levelled landscape of leisure, culture and commerce, known as West Village, is the work of architect Liu Jiakun, who has been named as the recipient of this year’s Pritzker prize, the world’s highest accolade in architecture. His is a name that few outside China will know, and yet within the country he is respected as one of the masters of his generation. Over the last four decades he has quietly built an exemplary body of work, mostly in the south-west province of Sichuan, ranging from museums and universities to public spaces and urban plans. Each of his projects channels the spirit of its place, forming carefully crafted backdrops to everyday life – free from the bombast and swagger of much contemporary architecture in China.

“I became an architect by accident,” says Liu, speaking through a translator in his studio in Chengdu. Like the man, his office is unassuming, housed in a nondescript tenement building where he also runs a small cafe and gallery. “My teacher told me that the subject would allow me to practise drawing, but I didn’t know more than that when I applied for university.”

He is only the second Chinese citizen to receive the Pritzker prize, following Wang Shu in 2012, which is hardly surprising, given that private practice was outlawed in China until the 1990s. The jury praised Liu’s ability to use “Chinese tradition without nostalgia, but as a springboard for innovation”, creating “new architecture that is at once a historical record, a piece of infrastructure, a landscape and a remarkable public space.”

Born in 1956, on the eve of the great Chinese famine, Liu spent much of his childhood at the hospital where his mother worked. He was sent to the countryside for three years during the Cultural Revolution to work the land, and applied to university when the institutions reopened in the late 1970s. On graduation in 1982, he worked briefly at the state-run Chengdu Architectural Design and Research Institute, but found the experience dispiriting. “It was a day job,” he says, “but my real interest was in writing.”

He left architecture and spent the next decade in Tibet and China’s western province of Xinjiang, where he practised painting, writing and meditation, producing several works of fiction. His dystopian 1999 novel, Bright Moonlight Plan, followed an architect’s futile struggle to build an ideal new town, taking inspiration from Le Corbusier’s tyrannical Radiant City plan (which would have bulldozed the centre of Paris) and the Soviet and Chinese communist revolutions.