Smiljan Radić Clarke

Smiljan Radić Clarke is a Chilean architect born in Santiago in 1965. He is the 2026 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, regarded internationally as architecture's highest distinction.

He studied architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, graduating in 1989]. After an initial setback—failing his final examination—he went on to study history at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia in Venice and traveled extensively, experiences he regards as the most essential course of his education. During his university years, he met the sculptor Marcela Correa, who would later become his wife.

He established his eponymous practice, Smiljan Radić Clarke, in 1995 in Santiago, Chile, which remains intentionally intimate in scale. Together with Correa, he designed their first house, Casa Chica (Vilches, Chile, 1997), a 24-square-meter building built by hand in the Andes Mountains.

Radić's work is defined by a refusal of repeatable architectural language; each project is approached as a singular inquiry, grounded in first principles and informed by noncontinuous history[reference:8]. His buildings often appear temporary, unstable, or deliberately unfinished—yet they provide a structured, optimistic and quietly joyful shelter, embracing vulnerability as an intrinsic condition of lived experience.

Beyond his architectural practice, Radić founded the Fundación de Arquitectura Frágil in Santiago in 2017, housed in his home studio, to support experimental architecture that challenges disciplinary boundaries.