Chilean architect Smiljan Radic Clarke has been awarded the 2026 Pritzker Prize, considered the highest international recognition in architecture. Among his notable projects are also the expansion of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art and the NAVE performance space. Despite his growing international profile, the architect maintains a small studio in Santiago from where he continues to explore new relationships between materials, landscape, and user experience, a pursuit that the Pritzker jury defined as 'an architecture that transforms the elemental into poetic experience.' Radic studied at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and completed his training at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, a period he considers decisive for his intellectual evolution. Throughout his career, he collaborated with sculptor Marcela Correa, a relationship that reinforced his interest in architecture as a crossroads between physical construction and conceptual reflection. He also gained wide international recognition with the pavilion he designed for the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, a translucent fiberglass shell supported on a ring of rocks, contrasting industrial lightness with geological weight. Radic was born in Santiago in 1965 in a family marked by the migratory experience: his paternal grandparents came from the Croatian island of Brač and the maternal branch was of British origin. The jury highlighted his career marked by material experimentation and his ability to integrate architecture and landscape through formally austere but technically precise solutions. The award organization, based in Chicago, emphasized in its statement that Radic's work 'often seems austere or elemental, but this impression hides a precise engineering and construction.' With this recognition, the 60-year-old architect joins the list of recent laureates that includes Riken Yamamoto in 2024 and David Chipperfield in 2023. Founder of his studio in Santiago de Chile in 1995, Radic developed a body of work that deliberately explores fragility, temporality, and dialogue with the natural environment. Among his most recognized projects is the Teatro Regional del Bío-Bío, whose polycarbonate translucent envelope on a steel structure filters light during the day and transforms the building into a luminous volume at night. Another example of his spatial search is the Restaurante Mestizo, in the Parque Bicentenario, in Santiago, where a horizontal roof supported by large stones generates an open shelter that dialogues with the landscape.
