UC Chile Architect Smiljan Radić Clarke Wins the 2026 Pritzker Prize, Considered the Nobel Prize of Architecture
“It is a strange surprise and a great honor,” expressed Radić after hearing the news. He is the second architecture graduate from UC Chile to receive this prestigious award, after Alejandro Aravena in 2016. The jury highlighted his “radical originality” and his “intentionally intimate practice, in which architecture remains personal, attentive, and deeply felt.”
On Thursday, UC Chile architect Smiljan Radić Clarke, former faculty member from the UC Chile Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Urban Studies (FADEU, as per its initials in Spanish), received the 2026 Pritzker Prize, which is awarded annually to a living architect who has made a significant contribution to the global practice. Due to its prestige, many consider it the Nobel Prize of architecture.
In the official announcement of the prize, the jury highlighted that the architect has “an intentionally intimate practice in which architecture remains personal, attentive, and deeply felt.”
After hearing the news, Smiljan Radić Clarke expressed that “this award is a strange surprise and a great honor. I sincerely thank the Pritzker Prize organization and the jury that supports it.”
The dean of UC Chile FADEU, Madgalena Vicuña del Río, celebrated the architect’s recognition: “We congratulate Smiljan Radić, architect and graduate from our faculty, who has been awarded the 2026 Pritzker Prize, the most important global award in architecture. From the UC Chile Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Urban Studies we proudly celebrate this recognition of a career that has undoubtedly made an essential contribution to Chile, not only as an architect, but also as a cultural agent through the Fundación de Arquitectura Frágil.”
She also highlighted that “this is the second time that the Pritzker Prize has been awarded to a Chilean architect, and once again it goes to a former student from our faculty.” The first awardee was the architect Alejandro Aravena, who received the award in 2016.
Radical originality
Smiljan Radić Clarke was born in Santiago in 1965 and, from childhood, has a passion for drawing and design. “Ideas inhabit things,” he reflects for the prize’s official announcement. “I have always tried to build settings where others might discover emergent ideas.”
He graduated from UC Chile in 1989 and attended the Instituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (Italy.) In 1996, he established his architecture firm in Santiago. Since 2017, Radić has channeled his interest to promote the study and dissemination of experimental architecture through the Fundación de Arquitectura Frágil.
“In each project, he is able to respond with radical originality, making the non-obvious obvious. He draws on the most irreducible principles of architecture, while simultaneously exploring the uncharted frontiers. Working under relentless circumstances, from the ends of the earth, with a studio of just a few collaborators, he is able to take us to the very essence of the built environment and the human condition,” stated Alejandro Aravena, President of the Pritzker Prize jury this year.
“Smiljan Radić belongs to a remarkable generation of Chilean architects who have received widespread international attention. His talent was already evident during his time as a student at the UC Chile School of Architecture. His work, widely publicized and even commissioned internationally, is distinguished by its originality and intensity, as well as by its significant contribution to the discipline,” remarks Fernando Pérez Oyarzún, former dean of the UC Chile School of Architecture and 2022 National Prize in Architecture.
Throughout his career, Radić has received numerous awards and distinctions. In 2001, he was recognized as the Best Architect Under 35 by the Chilean School of Architects. He received the Design Vanguard Award from Architectural Record magazine in 2008. A year later, he was named honorary member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) of the United States. In 2013, Universidad Mayor in Chile honored his career. In 2015, he received the Oris Prize in Zagreb, Croatia. In 2018, he received the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, the highest honor awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in the United States. In 2020, the Anahuac University in Mexico awarded him the Attolini Medal, and he was appointed as a member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts in Croatia. He was awarded the Grand Prize in the 2022 Pan-American Architecture Biennial in Quito, Ecuador.
The Pritzker Prize highlighted Radić’s international exhibitions, such as Global Ends at the Ma Gallery (Tokyo, Japan, 2010); Smiljan Radić: BESTIARY at TOTO Gallery Ma (Tokyo, Japan, 2010); House for the Poem of the Right Angle at 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).
