Chilean Smiljan Radić Clarke wins architecture’s highest honor

Smiljan Radić Clarke was named the newest Pritzker Prize-winner — an award often called the Nobel of architecture — Thursday morning.

Was he surprised by his win?

“Yes, completely,” the Chilean architect told NPR in an email. “[It’s] a huge honor. And possibly, in the very near future, a bit of a headache, since it will probably mean being far more exposed than I would like.”

The designer, known professionally as Smiljan Radić, is not exactly underexposed. But he is not as well known internationally as earlier Pritzker winners, such as Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei. Radić, who is 60 and the second Chilean architect to win the award, has designed dozens of buildings that have earned him a formidable reputation in artistic and intellectual circles. The New York Times described him as “a rock star among architects” in 2014, after his contribution to London’s prestigious Serpentine Pavilion.

For that annual installation that showcases cutting-edge architects, Radić designed a glowing rotund pod, almost alien in appearance, perched upon weathered quarry stones. Architecture critics were captivated.

“Seeming to belong at once to a world of science fiction and to a primordial past, the pavilion could well serve as the film set for a post-apocalyptic drama,” wrote Ellis Woodman in his review for The Telegraph. “And yet… it also invites association with the use of ruins and grottoes in the eighteenth century English landscape garden…. What is most captivating about Radić’s heroically peculiar pavilion is the way that it seems to stand out of time.”

Radić grew up in an immigrant family in Santiago. His father’s parents came from Croatia, and his mother’s from the United Kingdom. Although he colloquially uses his father’s surname, he told Pritzker officials upon winning the prize that he wanted to honor his mother by including her last name in the official announcement.

As a student, Radić nearly failed out of the architecture program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Later, he described the humiliating experience as formative, enabling him to travel and study history. While in college, he met sculptor Marcela Correa, who became his wife and close collaborator. Among the numerous works they’ve created together is the celebrated House for the Poem of the Right Angle, a secluded house in the woods of Vilches, Chile, completed in 2013.

A dramatic mishmash of stark angles and sinuous bulges, the black concrete structure was inspired by an abstract painting by Le Corbusier. The interior is open and airy, encased in cedar and stone.

“House for the Poem of the Right Angle signifies contemplative retreat,” the Pritzker committee wrote. “with thoughtfully placed openings, oriented upward to capture light and time, encouraging stillness and introspection.”

Radić’s other notable works include several performing arts spaces in Chile, including the NAVE arts hall in Santiago and Teatro Regional del Bío Bío in Concepción, which earned him accolades and awards. The Pritzker jury called the theater “a carefully engineered semi-translucent envelope [that] modulates light and supports acoustic performance through restraint. Construction becomes a kind of storytelling, where texture and mass carry as much meaning as form.”

From certain angles, his VIK winery in Millahue, Chile looks like a giant piece of agricultural equipment. It was, Radić said, intended to reflect the realities of winemaking, rather than a romance with the fermented grape. During an onstage lecture for the Architecture Foundation in 2023, Radić credited industrial process and chemistry as inspiration. “It’s not really about some concept I don’t like, the idea of terroir,” he said. “It’s a lot of myth.”

In recent years, Radić has also collaborated closely with the high fashion brand Alexander McQueen, designing stores in Miami, Las Vegas, London and Dubai. Yet the Pritzker jury noted that his buildings “invite interpretation, rather than consumption.”

This year’s jury was chaired by Alejandro Aravena, who became the first Chilean to win the Pritzker in 2016. His admiration for his countryman was evident in a Pritzker statement.

“In every work, he is able to answer with radical originality, making the unobvious obvious,” he wrote of Radić. “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.”

In February, the Pritzker Prize itself came under scrutiny when it became public that Tom Pritzker, the director of the foundation that awards the prize, had been in frequent communication with Jeffrey Epstein. Tom Pritzker is the son of Jay A. Pritzker, who established the prize with his wife Cindy in 1979. (The elder Pritzker died in 1999.)

The family had made a fortune in the hotel industry. Tom Pritzker stepped down as executive chairman of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation, though he remains the chairman of The Hyatt Foundation. A spokesperson for the Pritzker Prize told the New York Times that the Hyatt Foundation protected the prize from outside influence and its financial support enabled the jury “to remain assured in the strength of its process and focus entirely on the celebration of architectural excellence.”

The prize bestows $100,000 on the winner, as well as a bronze medallion.

“This sad moment in history is not the best circumstance in which to receive an award,” Radić told NPR in an email. He was responding to a question about the importance of architecture during a moment when so many important buildings are being destroyed around the world in conflicts and wars.

“The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra once wrote in the 1940s that ‘the sky is falling apart,’ and today we might add that the earth itself seems to be cracking,” he wrote. “Still, I believe that architecture is a positive act — it helps create concrete realities where people can value their surroundings in a different way.”