The 2026 Pritzker Prize has been awarded to Chilean architect Smiljan Radić Clarke for creating architecture that embraces fragility, material experimentation and cultural memory.
Radić is the fifty-fifth laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. His career in architecture spans almost four decades encompassing a vast portfolio that includes private residences, cultural institutions, commercial buildings and temporary pavilions. His path was not without obstacles: after initially failing his first attempt at the final architectural exam at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, he expanded his studies in history at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and travelled extensively, experiences he considers central to his development as an architect.
Radić’s work rethinks enclosure as a form of resistance, care and quiet resilience. Reflecting on these ideas, he notes: “There is a complexity in enclosure: a shelter provides a distance from reality, whereas a refuge urges you to feel that the life inside is unique. But what we need is protection – a place of stability to accept fragility.”
Among Radić’s most notable projects are the Teatro Regional del Biobío (Concepción, Chile, 2018); Guatero (Santiago, Chile, 2023); the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (London, the United Kingdom, 2014); NAVE Performing Arts Center (Santiago, Chile, 2015); House for the Poem of the Right Angle (Vilches, Chile, 2013); Vik Millahue Winery (Millahue, Chile, 2013) and Carbonero House (Melipilla, Chile, 1998).
In 2017, Radić founded the Fundación de Arquitectura Frágil, an initiative dedicated to experimental architecture that challenges convention disciplinary limits through exhibitions, workshops and shared inquiry.
“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,” commented the jury for the 2026 Pritzker Prize.
Upon receiving the award, Radić stated, “Architecture exists between large, massive, and enduring forms – structures that stand under the sun for centuries, waiting for our visit – and smaller, fragile constructions – fleeting as the life of a fly, often without a clear destiny under conventional light. Within this tension of disparate times, we strive to create experiences that carry emotional presence, encouraging people to pause and reconsider a world that so often passes them by with indifference,” expresses Radić.
Source: Architecture - architectureau
