Smiljan Radić Clarke: Get to Know the 2026 Pritzker Winner's Work

Written by Valentina Díaz
Published on March 12, 2026

The 2026 Pritzker Price Award has been awarded this year to the Chilean architect of Croatian descent, Smiljan Radić Clarke. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1965, his practice evokes a geography of extremes, shaped by the tectonic tension between the staggering weight of the Andes and the seismic instability of the territory. After graduating from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and pursuing further studies in aesthetics in Venice, Smiljan Radić Clarke established his base in Santiago. From there, he has developed one of the most singular visions in contemporary architecture. His work privileges the intensity of the moment through a fragile architecture. Within it, the building operates as a temporary and tactile refuge that places the spectator in a state of aesthetic uncertainty, oscillating between ancestral ruin and avant-garde artefact.

+ 59

This raw material identity is consolidated through his ongoing collaboration with sculptor Marcela Correa, whose craft anchors Smiljan Radić's architecture to a visceral, tactile reality. They transform massive elements—such as multi-ton granite rocks selected from local quarries—into structural pieces that support concrete slabs or define spaces. This tension between geological mass and lightweight structures of resin or fibreglass reveals a methodology centred on the texture of analog thought, where intuition and material testing restore a human and artisanal scale to the creative process.

His spaces, often characterized by an introverted and cavernous quality, function as shelters that appeal to a primitive memory through phenomenological scaling, the ability to observe the morphology of an everyday object—such as a deformed plastic container or a papier-mâché model—and project a habitable dimension onto it. Embracing the imperfection of materials like cedar, copper, or resin, his practice prioritizes the question over the dogma. The work of Smiljan Radić stands as a sophisticated synthesis of the human condition, finding harmony in the collision of opposing forces: that strange mixture of our biological fragility and the spiritual ambition to endure through time.

Smiljan Radić Clarke Receives the 2026 Pritzker Prize, The Artist of Unspoken Architecture