Santiago: The Latest Architecture and News

Smiljan Radić Clarke, the 2026 Pritzker Prize winner, is a contemporary Chilean architect known for his experimental approach to design, with a practice that balances the elemental with the intimate, the monumental with the fragile. Over the course of more than three decades, Radić has developed an architecture that resists repetition and conventional stylistic categorization, favoring instead deeply site-specific, materially attuned, and culturally reflective interventions.

His work negotiates between permanence and impermanence, memory and imagination, creating buildings that are as much about human experience and emotion as they are about structure and form. Across residences, cultural institutions, and temporary installations, Radić's architecture foregrounds the interplay between context, materials, and the subtle gestures that shape how spaces are inhabited and perceived.

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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.

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Chilean architect Smiljan Radić Clarke has been announced as the laureate of the 2026 Pritzker Architecture Prize, regarded as one of the highest honors in the field of architecture. The award recognizes Radić for a body of work that explores architecture through material experimentation, spatial perception, and a careful engagement with landscape and context. Born in Santiago, Chile, where he continues to live and work, Radić leads the practice Smiljan Radić Clarke, established in 1995. As the second Chilean to receive the prize, after Alejandro Aravena in 2016, he joins a distinguished list of previous laureates, including Liu Jiakun in 2025, Riken Yamamoto in 2024, David Chipperfield in 2023, and Diébédo Francis Kéré in 2022.

Radić's architecture operates within a territory where the phenomenological experience of space precedes explanation. His buildings often appear quiet, elemental, and resistant to easy verbal interpretation, encouraging visitors to experience them through movement, atmosphere, and perception rather than through formal expression. 

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For centuries, burial practices across various cultures have connected honoring the deceased to the earth, with cemeteries firmly grounded in the soil as a symbol of eternal peace. Yet, as discussed in one of our articles, No More Room for the Living or the Dead: Exploring the Future for Burials in Asia, land shortages in densely developed urban areas present significant challenges to traditional burial practices, especially as societies like Japan face an aging population. Given these spatial constraints, how can above-ground cemeteries and columbariums be designed to provide a dignified, tranquil resting place while respecting cultural values?

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Testimonial Spaces, the theme of Chile's pavilion at the recent Venice Biennial 2021, opened to the public on the 18th of January at Santiago's Museum of Contemporary Art.

Curated by architects Emilio Marín and Rodrigo Sepúlveda, Testimonial Spaces brings together 525 paintings based on testimonies and everyday stories from the José María Caro neighbourhood in Santiago, in line with "How will we live together?", the theme of the biennial curated by Lebanese architect Hashim Sarkis.