Like his architecture, the layers of Smiljan Radić Clarke’s life form a noncontinuous history, shaped by movement, openness, and the gradual construction of meaning. Born in Santiago to an immigrant family—his father’s parents from Brač, Croatia, and his mother’s from the United Kingdom—Radić grew up with a heightened awareness of belonging, fostering an understanding of life as something assembled, not merely inherited.
“Sometimes, you have to produce your own roots. That gives you freedom.”
Smiljan Radić.
His path to architecture was not epiphanic but emerged gradually through a series of experiences, doubts, and discoveries. He spent much of his childhood drawing and first encountered architecture at the age of fourteen, when an art teacher assigned him the task of designing a building as an exercise—an early memory that, in retrospect, resonates with the work he would later pursue.
Radić studied architecture at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he initially failed his final examination before graduating in 1989. This setback proved formative, leading him to study history at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and to travel extensively, experiences he regards as the most essential course of his education. Beyond conventional definitions of the discipline, philosophy, art, and allusions to mythical and literary references were infused into both his imagery and his forms.
“Ideas inhabit things,” he reflects. “I have always tried to build settings where others might discover emergent ideas.”
Photograph courtesy of Smiljan Radić.
During his university years, he met the sculptor Marcela Correa, who would later become his client and eventually his wife. In 1995, he founded his eponymous practice, Smiljan Radić Clarke, in Santiago, Chile, which remains intentionally intimate in scale. Together, they designed her first house, Casa Chica (Vilches, Chile, 1997), a 24-square-meter building constructed by hand in the Andes Mountains. Although the pair collaborate occasionally, they maintain a daily, ongoing dialogue of ideas carried through time.
Personal circumstances and sustained inquiry led Radić to reconsider enclosure as a condition of resistance, care, and quiet resilience. “There is a complexity in enclosure: a shelter provides a distance from reality, whereas a refuge urges you to feel that the life inside is unique. But what we need is protection—a place of stability to accept fragility.” This tension between refuge and shelter, protection and introspection, mirrors his own experience of constructing stability in the absence of fixed roots.
Photograph courtesy of Smiljan Radić.
Over time, these interests expanded across scales and typologies: civic and cultural institutions, commercial buildings, private residences, and temporary structures. With Correa, he created The Boy Hidden in a Fish (Venice, Italy, 2010), a granite and cedar installation for the entrance of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Sejima Kazuyo, juror and 2010 Pritzker Prize Laureate, which shelters human figures within the mass, reflecting his attention to bodily and emotional registers.
He was selected to design the 14th Serpentine Pavilion (London, United Kingdom, 2014), a translucent fiberglass shell resting upon load-bearing stones, creating a temporary refuge that is neither fully enclosed nor fully transparent. His works suggest an architecture attuned to emotional presence and the quiet intelligence of construction.
Photograph courtesy of Smiljan Radić.
In 2017, Radić founded the Fundación de Arquitectura Frágil, housed in his home studio in Santiago, to support experimental architecture that challenges disciplinary boundaries. Through exhibitions, workshops, and shared inquiry, the foundation reflects its belief in architecture as a collective and evolving practice.
Radić’s work has been recognized with numerous international honors, including Best Architect Under 35 by the Colegio de Arquitectos de Chile (Chile, 2001), the Architectural Record Design Vanguard Award (United States, 2008), the Oris Award (Croatia, 2015), the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (United States, 2018), and the Grand Prize at the Pan-American Architecture Biennial of Quito (Ecuador, 2022). He is an Honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects and an Honorary Fellow of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, since 2009 and 2020, respectively.
Photograph courtesy of Smiljan Radić.
His work has been featured in major international exhibitions, including Global Ends at Gallery Ma (Tokyo, Japan, 2010); Un Ruido Naranjo at Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima, Japan, 2012); The Wardrobe and the Mattress, Hermès Gallery, Tokyo, with Marcela Correa (Tokyo, Japan, 2013); Bus Stop for Krumbach at Kunsthaus Bregenz (Bregenz, Austria, 2013); Smiljan Radić: BESTIARY at TOTO Gallery Ma (Tokyo, Japan, 2016); The House for the Poem of the Right Angle in Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art (New York, United States, 2015–2016); and Guatero Bubble at the XXII Bienal de Arquitectura y Urbanismo de Chile (Santiago, Chile, 2023).
Radić continues to live and work from Santiago, Chile, sustaining an intentionally intimate practice in which architecture remains personal, attentive, and deeply felt.
