The Pritzker Architecture Prize named Chilean architect Smiljan Radić Clarke as the 2026 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. He is the 55th Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
The announcement of the annual architecture prize was delayed this year due to ties between Tom Pritzker and Jeffrey Epstein.
Radić is based in Santiago, Chile. He works out of his home studio, Pequeño Edificio Burgués, and has participated in both the International Architecture Biennale of Venice and Chilean Architecture Biennial. He is best known for his residential and institutional projects around the world.
The Chilean architect is lauded widely for his experimentation with shape and material. Each of his projects is unique in its form and execution.
“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,” Radić said in a statement, describing his philosophy.
“Within this tension of disparate times,” Radić elaborated, “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.”
Radić pays close attention to context, often blurring the line between built and unbuilt, as seen in projects like Vik Winery (2013), an unpretentious low-lying structure topped by an expansive tensile membrane roof.
Some of the other best known projects by Radić are CR House, built in Santiago in 2003; Pite House, completed in Papudo in 2006; Santiago’s Restaurant Mestizo, completed in 2006; a 2013 extension to the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art; and Teatro Regional del Biobío, in Concepción, Chile (2018).
Radić was awarded the Serpentine Pavilion commission in 2014. His design was an ovoid structure made of fiberglass that was situated atop an arrangement of locally-sourced stones.
More recent works include Conguillío, Chile’s Prism House, built in 2020; London Sky Bubble (2021); and Chanchera House, completed in 2022 in Puerto Octay, Chile. Radić now has projects underway in Albania, Spain, Switzerland, and the U.K.
Jurors commended his “body of work positioned at the crossroads of uncertainty, material experimentation, and cultural memory,” and said he “favors fragility over any unwarranted claim to certainty.”
Members of the 2026 Pritzker Prize jury were Alejandro Aravena, a fellow Chilean architect and 2016 Pritzker Prize recipient; Barry Bergdoll; Deborah Berke; Stephen Breyer; André Aranha Corrêa do Lago; Anne Lacaton (2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner); Hashim Sarkis; Kazuyo Sejima (2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner); and Manuela Lucá-Dazio.
“In every work, he is able to answer with radical originality, making the unobvious obvious,” said Aravena, the jury chair.
“He reverts back to the most irreducible basic foundations of architecture, exploring at the same time, limits that have not yet been touched,” Aravena added. “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.”
A ceremony for the Pritzker Prize is typically held each year in May. Radić will receive a $100,000 cash prize and bronze medallion. His win follows that of architect Liu Jiakun who was the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner.
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