Below, we present a series of videos featuring their latest statements and most significant works.
Also included is the jury's statement:
The Pritzker Architecture Prize is awarded in recognition of exceptional talent, vision, and commitment that, over time, have given rise to profound and enduring contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture. Smiljan Radić’s body of work embodies these values in their most radical and essential form.
To render the qualities of his architectural work in spoken language is intrinsically difficult, for in his designs he works with dimensions of experience that are immediately palpable but escape verbalization—like the perception of time itself: immediately recognizable, yet conceptually evasive. His buildings are not conceived simply as visual artifacts; rather, they demand embodied presence.
A first fundamental paradox of Smiljan Radić’s architecture is in that it establishes a personal, almost introspective point of entry, without culminating in withdrawal. On the contrary, what begins as an individual encounter expands into a broader, collective resonance. This is, perhaps, the nature of true art: it addresses each of us as singular beings, one to one, and yet propels us towards a shared origin—an atavistic place beyond race, gender, or culture. Such a capacity acquires particular relevance in times of polarisation and dehumanisation, and may well constitute the true value of an architect whose work can be described, without hesitation, as profoundly original: the art of architecture practiced as a sustained attempt to reconnect all individuals with a deeper origin. Importantly, this should not be mistaken for nostalgia or historical revivalism. His stripping away of the surface is grounded in radical experimentation and an unrelenting interrogation of convention, precedent, and the well-trodden path. Herein lies a further paradox: his unorthodox approach to design may initially appear unusual, unexpected—even rebellious—yet far from producing alienation or estrangement, his anti-canonical stance feels fresh and unprecedented. It conveys the unmistakable sensation of encountering something new.
Through unobvious connections and patterns of circulation, Radić’s buildings offer a multiplicity of stages for users to act, interact, and even change the narratives that unfold within them. The masterful composition of volumes and the precise calibration of scales lend a sense of monumentality to the everyday life, whether experienced at an individual or public level. In Radić’s architecture, monumental presence is reworked through fragility, lightness and apparent instability, achieved not through scale alone, but through atmosphere, material tension and spatial intensity. This allows everyday actions—walking, waiting, gathering—to acquire significance without being subordinated to a grand ideological narrative. Through his deeply democratic approach, the monumental is thus returned to common experience rather than reserved for exceptional moments.
Through a body of work positioned at the crossroads of an iconoclast language, material exploration and cultural memory, Smiljan Radić favours fragility over any unwarranted claim to certainty. His buildings may 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.
They are not firmly anchored to the ground; rather, they are delicately placed upon it, often hovering slightly above the surface and only occasionally making contact. Any lasting alteration to the site is carefully avoided, as though they could be removed at any moment and the ground restored to its original state. Inspired by the powerful and yet seismic Chilean environmental context and shifting from the logic—often implicit in construction—of domination and ownership towards coexistence, Radić presents architecture as a guest rather than a master of the site, acknowledging the primacy of the landscape and, by extension, of collective memory and shared territory over individual authorship.
This sense of architectural impermanence is frequently expressed through the choice of materials. While varying from one project to another, these are always carefully considered, contextually responsive and informed by local availability.
Reinforcing the democratic ethos of his work, Radić employs materials—whether industrial or natural, refined or traditionally regarded as marginal—in ways that are neither nostalgic nor merely pragmatic. Instead, they unsettle established hierarchies of value: high and low, refined and crude, permanent and provisional coexist without clear distinction. This material equivalence mirrors the social openness of his spaces, in which no user is privileged over another. The circus tent coronating the roof of NAVE in Santiago, the white membrane enveloping the Teatro Regional del Bío-Bío in Concepción—glowing with a warm, welcoming light at dusk—and the monumental Guatero inflatable pavilion designed for the Santiago Architecture Biennale all become structurally sophisticated yet playful stages, in which unexpected textures and colours engage with volumes of equally unexpected form.
If architecture gives shape to the ways in which people live, Radić’s work produces spatial experiences that feel at once surprising and entirely natural. They are surprising in their flexible capacity to combine, question and dismantle established typologies; natural in the way they emerge both from his personal history and from that of those who will ultimately inhabit his buildings. While fully responsive to its function, each project contains an element of unexpectedness: to experience Smiljan Radić’s buildings is to have one’s curiosity provoked and sustained. He pushes coherent spatial strategies to their limits, developing them with rigour in order to actively engage the user: no specialised knowledge is required to “understand” the space, because understanding is never complete. His work defies the constraints of a single concept: the spaces he creates are often ambiguous, at times even unsettling, never pre-defined. They resist complete comprehension through a single viewpoint, and it is precisely this resistance that restores depth and complexity to architecture. Giant boulders set upright—like at the Mestizo Restaurant in Santiago, buildings that appear barely to touch the ground—like Casa Pite in Papudo, and the frequent rejection of the conventional Cartesian coordinate axes—the House for the Poem of the Right Angle in Vilches—all invite interpretation, rather than consumption.
For reminding us that architecture is an art, in that it touches the very core of the human condition; for allowing the discipline to embrace imperfection and fragility, offering quiet shelters in a world shaped by uncertainty, without the need to be louder or more spectacular in order to matter; for creating buildings whose hybrid nature reflects the contemporary blurring of disciplinary boundaries, and which do not speak on behalf of people but instead allow people to find their own voice through them, Smiljan Radić Clarke is named the 2026 Pritzker Prize Laureate.
