The ability to fabricate 1D nanotexture photoanodes with a high degree of multifunctionalities by structural and morphological control still represents a vital issue towards boosting the ultimate photoelectric conversion efficiency of DSCs. In this work, we report an innovative experimental design for insitu hydrothermal growth of hierarchical ZnO nanourchin on multi-scale ZnO (i.e. nanocrystalline aggregate) seeded layer as photoanode for use in high-efficiency DSCs. It is found that this fascinating 1D nanoarchitecture can simultaneously achieve three favorable characteristics which are generally incompatible with one another in a mono-layer photoelectrode: large dye adsorption amount, strong light scattering and direct electron transport networks, hence leading to a significant improvement of solar cell performance ranging from light harvesting capacity to electron collection efficiency. An enhanced conversion efficiency of 6.40% for hierarchical ZnO nanourchin-based DSC is achieved, with a significant efficiency improvement of 31.1% in comparison with ZnO nanocrystalline aggregate-based DSC, and also far higher than reported efficiency of pure 1D ZnO-based cell. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.