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Chilean architect Smiljan Radić Clarke is the winner of the 2026 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the 55th edition of the world’s most prestigious international architecture award. Born in 1965 in Santiago, Chile, Radić graduated in 1989 from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He also studied at IUAV in Venice. Today he lives and works in his hometown, where in 1995 he founded the studio Smiljan Radić Clarke.
As stated in the jury citation for the 2026 Pritzker Prize, “through a body of work positioned at the crossroads of uncertainty, material experimentation, and cultural memory, Smiljan Radić favours fragility over any unwarranted claim to certainty. His buildings appear temporary, unstable, or deliberately unfinished—almost on the point of disappearance—yet they provide a structured, optimistic and quietly joyful shelter, embracing vulnerability as an intrinsic condition of lived experience”.
Over more than three decades of activity, the design practice led by Radić has realized cultural institutions, civic spaces, commercial buildings, private residences and installations in several countries around the world, including Albania, Austria, Chile, Croatia, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Central to his work is a deep attention to context, according to an approach that understands place not only in physical terms but also as the convergence of history, social practices and political circumstances. For this reason, Radić avoids repeatable formulas in favor of site-specific strategies, allowing each building to emerge from the particular conditions of its setting.
Architecture may therefore be partially embedded in the ground, as in the Restaurant Mestizo (Santiago, Chile, 2006); oriented to protect itself from prevailing winds or intense light, as in the Pite House (Papudo, Chile, 2005); or shaped through adaptive reuse, as in Chile Antes de Chile, the expansion of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art (Santiago, Chile, 2013).
In Radić’s design method, materials such as concrete, stone, wood and glass are used to shape weight, light, sound and spatial enclosure. His works reveal a profound empathy for the human experience, and the interventions that bear his signature cannot be classified either as restoration or as replacement processes. Rather, they emerge from deliberate calculations of scale and use.
Among his most important works, in chronological order, are: CR House (Santiago, 2003); The Boy Hidden in a Fish, with Marcela Correa, for the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2010); House for the Poem of the Right Angle (Vilches, Chile, 2013); Vik Millahue Winery (Millahue, Chile, 2013); the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (London, 2014); the art space NAVE (Santiago, Chile, 2015); the Teatro Regional del Biobío (Concepción, Chile, 2018); Prism House (Conguillío, Chile, 2020); London Sky Bubble (London, 2021); Chanchera House (Puerto Octay, Chile, 2022); Guatero, for the 22nd Chilean Architecture Biennial (Santiago, 2023); and his own studio-home, Pequeño Edificio Burgués (Santiago, Chile, 2023).
“In every work, he is able to answer with radical originality, making the unobvious obvious. He reverts back to the most irreducible basic foundations of architecture, exploring at the same time, limits that have not yet been touched. Developed in a context of unforgiving circumstances, from the edge of the world, with a practice of just a few collaborators, he is capable of bringing us to the innermost core of the built environment and the human condition”.
Alejandro Aravena, Chair of the Jury and 2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate
>>> Discover the twin residences designed by Smiljan Radić in Santiago, Chile, for two artists
Cover Image: Smiljan Radić Clarke, courtesy of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
