Known for his imaginative use of materials, the architect is a departure from the jury’s recent preference for those with a strong social practice.
For years, the Pritzker Prize has been announced in the first week of March, though this year, the fanfare was slightly delayed. The holdup followed the revelation that Tom Pritzker—now former executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation, which sponsors the prestigious award—had a longstanding relationship with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This isn’t to say that the wait was necessarily disappointing; as Edwin Heathcoate wrote for Dezeen, "The prize matters very much less today than it did 25 years ago. Its historic affirmation of the lone male genius now looks stale," he writes. Indeed, over the past decade the constant celebration of the solo starchitect (notably, its mythology) has grown tiresome—every year I’m not sure if I look forward to the Pritzker announcement because I’m genuinely invested in the outcome, or if seeking another opportunity for an eyeroll.
Still, the honors press on: on Thursday, the Chilean architect Smiljan Radić Clarke was named this year’s recipient of architecture’s most prestigious award, joining the ranks of Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, and Zaha Hadid. The descendant of Croatian immigrants to Chile, Radić has built a portfolio of work primarily in South America, including private residences, cultural institutions, and commercial buildings. His isn’t a household name like the usual cadre of starchitects, yet one might imagine that he likes it that way. His practice resists stylistic categorization, utilizing materials with heft like stone, wood, and metals set against transparent glass, fabric, fiberglass and more. Assembled in structures that read like an energy-rich Kandinsky painting or a Zen-like Torkwase Dyson sculpture, his work appears contradictory, both anchored to the earth while it stands on its tiptoes. By recognizing Radić’s quiet yet monolithic body of work, the prize is departing from their recent streak of Pritzker winners with a strong social practice.
Radić first opened his practice in 1995 and quickly distinguished himself through an imaginative use of materials in stunning landscapes: With 1995’s Casa Chica, he created a 300-square foot home using only wood, upcycled doors, and plate glass that sit on granite slabs in a wooded area; later, his 2004 Copper House clad a family home in weighty, weathered copper tiles that seem to pull the sloped roof downward, while opposing floor to ceiling glass windows provide contrast, lightening the load on the surrounding undulated plain. He progressed to larger commercial work, including the Mestizo restaurant in Santiago where, like Casa Chica, stone—large, sculptural boulders—became part of the building’s structural engineering. Collaborating with his wife, the sculptor Marcela Correa, these monumental stones support a steel trellis roof draped in a fabric canopy.
Through these earlier explorations Radić developed a philosophy of "fragility." As he told architect Jose Castillo in a 2009 BOMB interview, "fragility" isn’t necessarily about the materials he chooses but about the construction and assemblage of those materials—the handbuilt quality of the Casa Chica, or the large boulders that precariously support Mestizo’s canopy, for example. This theory came to fruition in 2014 when Radić was invited to design the Serpentine Pavilion, thrusting him into the international spotlight. Like his previous work, Radić’s pavilion created an organic ovular space encased in a semi-translucent glass reinforced plastic eggshell; the structure sits—almost slumped, succumbing to gravity’s pull—atop his signature boulders. The water feature beneath the pavilion passively cools the building, according to Wallpaper. Radić told publication that the building was a folly, a "fake ruin" perched on rocks that appear to be part of the surrounding park but actually act as the pavilion’s foundation.
In 2024, Radić launched the Fundación de Arquitectura Frágil (Foundation for Fragile Architecture), which acts as a home for his practice as well as an extensive archive of his collected books and ephemera from 20th century radical architecture movements. Though he has stated that "art and architecture have nothing to do with each other," there are interesting linkages between his assemblages of architecture and natural materials that takes from the radical Arte Povera movement which, in the 1970s deployed "poor" materials like earth, recycled objects, and stone—as well as natural processes like gravity, balance, and decay—to produce artwork that refuted capital in commercialized art. In some ways, Radić’s buildings perform similarly: By integrating the surrounding landscape and playing on contrasting materials—glass with heavy stone, metallic-looking inflatables (such as that of his pillow-like 2023 Central Pavilion at Chile’s Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism), it’s as if the architect is defying ownership and stylistic pigeonholing. Who owns the rocks, sunlight, gravity that constitute his work? Can these elements define an architectural style? As these questions aren’t easily answered, Radić’s work, too, isn’t easily pinned down. Online, his buildings are scattered across interviews and articles, photo galleries; he speaks frequently of poetry, philosophy, and fine arts, framing his architectural thinking as a sort of interdisciplinary intellectual endeavor.
"In every work, he is able to answer with radical originality, making the unobvious obvious," Alejandro Aravena, Chair of the Jury and 2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate, said in a statement. "Developed in a context of unforgiving circumstances, from the edge of the world, with a practice of just a few collaborators, he is capable of bringing us to the innermost core of the built environment and the human condition."
This practice seems a far cry from previous Pritzker awardees in the recent past, including the aforementioned Aravena, whose work in affordable housing secured him a Pritzker in 2016. 2024’s Riken Yamamoto focuses on building dense, affordable apartments that are framed around common, shared space; the Pritzker committee’s recognition of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal’s work in adaptive reuse in 2021 spoke toward our global urgency to address embodied carbon and climate change. Radić’s recognition is in some ways an uncontroversial decision; though bold in its theory and presentation, his work isn’t pointing directly toward our current global political conditions or crises (he told BOMB "The political interests me only in regard to the popular vote."); we might argue that he is gesturing in that direction. But in the context of the Pritzker Prize, it’s a reminder that some mega-awards weren’t created for the purpose of celebrating only those who design within the social and political realms. As issues of climate, housing, energy, and affordability bubble to the top of an architectural practice, some awards are not representative of the professions’ shifting winds, but simply an opportunity to acknowledge a lifetime of practice.
Top photo of Smiljan Radić and his Serpentine Pavilion by rune hellestad/Corbis via Getty Images
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