The 2026 Pritzker Prize goes to a Chilean who creates mirages. Smiljan Radić's aesthetic of fragility triumphs over monumental pathos
Modern architecture has accustomed us to concrete and glass with a claim to eternity. However, today the most prestigious architectural award went to a man whose buildings, both in form and materials used, resemble a temporary nomadic dwelling, semi-real, ephemeral mirages.
The inflatable Guatero Pavilion at the 2023 Chilean Architecture Biennial. Architecture made of air. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
The jury of the Pritzker Prize, often called the Nobel of architecture, announced the 2026 laureate as Chilean architect Smiljan Radić Clarke.
Radić was born in Santiago in 1965 to an immigrant family: his grandfather sailed to South America from the Croatian island of Brač, and he has British roots on his mother's side. It is possible that this uncertain ethnic background shaped his unique worldview.
Portrait of 2026 Pritzker Prize laureate Smiljan Radić Clarke. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Where others seek monumentality, he sees beauty in fragility. Where colleagues erect cyclopean towers to satisfy their own ego, Radić creates objects capable of dissolving into the landscape.
Architecture as a Guest
For centuries, the paradigm of construction has been based on the idea of human dominance over nature. Radić proposes a fundamentally different approach, which jury chairman Alejandro Aravena aptly characterized as a return to the irreducible foundations of human existence.
Radić's building does not dominate its surroundings; it is a guest. A guest who understands that nature, climate, and historical context were here before it and will remain after.
This philosophy was most vividly manifested in his most famous European project — the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London in 2014. Radić placed a translucent fiberglass shell, resembling a gigantic cocoon or a piece of parchment, on huge unprocessed quarry stones.
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London (2014). Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Interior of the Serpentine Pavilion. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
It's interesting to observe how two worlds collide: Chilean improvisation and British bureaucracy. Radić recalled how in London he was given just one day to select nine boulders from a quarry.
In Chile, he could make a mistake, return, replace a stone, adapt the project on the fly, because there, the culture of self-building allows for changing material properties right on site.
In Europe, however, engineers demanded a shell thickness of forty millimeters for safety, which almost destroyed the concept, as it made the structure opaque, not transparent.
This process became for him a confrontation with "safety limits," whereas true art, according to Radić, always operates at the "limits of danger" or uncertainty.
Evening view of the Serpentine Pavilion. The object looks like a mirage or an alien spacecraft landed in Kensington Gardens. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Details of the Serpentine Pavilion's construction. Radić intentionally leaves a sense of incompleteness, of temporality. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Disregard for Style
If you try to pinpoint "Radić's style," you will fail. He deliberately avoids repetition and refuses projects when a client asks for "a form they've seen somewhere."
Instead of form, Radić sells atmosphere. And very often, he creates it together with his wife, sculptor Marcela Correa. The boundary between architecture and sculpture in their projects blurs so much that it's impossible to tell where the pragmatics of architecture end and pure aesthetics begin.
Take, for example, the Mestizo restaurant in Santiago, built back in 2006. Radić took gigantic boulders and made them supporting columns for a black, geometric roof.
The client initially didn't want the restaurant to be visible from the road, and the architect found a brilliant solution: he integrated exterior elements into the interior. The stones seem to mark the boundary with the natural surroundings while simultaneously extending it inside the restaurant. The visitor is indoors but feels like they are on an open terrace, surrounded by nature.
Mestizo Restaurant in Santiago. Gigantic boulders serve as supporting columns. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Mestizo Restaurant in Santiago. Gigantic boulders serve as supporting columns. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Interior of Mestizo Restaurant. The architectural intervention in the landscape here is minimal, and the boundary between the interior space and the park is blurred. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
No less paradoxical is the "House for the Poem of the Right Angle," built in the Vilches forest. It is a black monolithic structure, hidden among the trees, resembling a strange research station. Instead of creating enormous floor-to-ceiling windows, as demanded by modern glamorous minimalism, Radić created thick walls with upward-facing openings. In doing so, he cut off the visual noise of the forest, leaving residents with only the sky, light, and sounds of the forest, creating a physical sense of security.
House for the Poem of the Right Angle in the autumn landscape of Vilches. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Interior of the House for the Poem of the Right Angle. The space creates a feeling of complete security and isolation from external hustle and bustle. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Detail of the interior of the House for the Poem of the Right Angle. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Circus Instead of Pathos
Radić clearly ironizes over the pathos of "grand architecture." He is fascinated by temporary structures: tents, kiosks, marquees of traveling circuses. He is not afraid to work with cheap, fragile, or unusual materials.
When he was tasked with reconstructing a historical early 20th-century mansion in Santiago, damaged by an earthquake, into the NAVE cultural center, he did not imitate antiquity. Radić preserved the exterior shell, cleared out the interior for modern rehearsal spaces, and on the roof… he built a terrace, which he covered with a real colorful circus tent. This gesture is like a slap in the face to academic restoration; it introduces an atmosphere of festivity and temporality where officialdom was supposed to reign.
NAVE Center terrace with a circus tent. Irony and festivity on the roof of a historic building. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
NAVE Center terrace with a circus tent. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Partially ruined walls of the past coexist with a new reinterpretation of historical architecture. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
NAVE Cultural Center in Santiago. The classical facade conceals a radical reinterpretation of the interior space. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
A similar play with the intangible occurred during the work on the expansion of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art. Instead of erecting a new volume next to the historic colonial building, the architect went underground, creating new galleries there.
And he covered the inner courtyard with a transparent pneumatic cushion. One does not see a heavy roof; one only sees the light softly dispersing over the exhibits that had lain in darkness for centuries.
This theme further developed into the Guatero project — a gigantic inflatable pavilion for the Chilean Architecture Biennial in 2023. This is no longer quite a building; it is an architectural environment sustained solely by air pressure.
The inflatable Guatero Pavilion at the 2023 Chilean Architecture Biennial. Architecture made of air. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Interior of the Guatero Pavilion. The thin shell creates an intimate space right in the middle of a city square. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Ghosts Against Skyscrapers
In a world where star architects manage corporations with hundreds of employees and churn out projects from Beijing to Dubai, Smiljan Radić appears almost like a hermit.
He deliberately keeps his studio staff between five and twelve people to personally participate in every stage. For years, he has collected drawings and sketches of "radical architecture" from the 1960s, establishing a special Fragile Architecture Foundation for them.
Radić openly scoffs at his colleagues' passion for skyscrapers, calling them a symbol of phallic power and the desire to "dominate the city."
He named his only tower project for San Cristóbal Hill in Santiago "the ghost." It is a tensegrity structure (from the English "tensional integrity") made of grey steel, which, in cloudy weather, was supposed to simply disappear from sight, leaving no scars in the sky.
Even when he has to work on large-scale public buildings, he makes them understated. The Biobío Regional Theater in Concepción, completed in 2018, is wrapped in translucent polycarbonate. By day, it appears as a restrained volume, concealing its essence, while at night it transforms into a giant lantern, softly illuminating the riverbank. No monumentality, just a play of light, shadow, and sound.
Biobío Regional Theater in Concepción. A lantern-building that rejects monumentality in favor of light. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Restrained geometry of the Biobío Regional Theater against the river landscape. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
Structural forest under the shell of the Biobío Regional Theater. Photo: Pritzker Prize website
The Pritzker Committee's decision in 2026 reminds architects that in times of total polarization, ecological crises, and social anxiety, we don't need new Towers of Babel. We need shelters — sometimes strange, sometimes imperfect, but endowed with emotional intelligence.
In Smiljan Radić's architecture, we are all just temporary guests who need to learn to live quietly and respectfully on this earth.
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