Breaking news: Chilean architect Smiljan Radić has been announced as the 2026 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate for his buildings that are ” immediately recognizable, yet conceptually evasive”.
Radić, who established his practice in 1995 in Chile, was announced as the winner Thursday morning of the Pritzker Prize, the highest prize in the architecture field.
In the jury that selected the 61-year-old architect as the winner, citing his experimentation and noting that the vulnerability of Radić’s work embraces something fundamental about the human condition.
“Quietly joyful shelter”
“Through a body of work positioned at the crossroads of uncertainty, material experimentation, and cultural memory, Smiljan Radić favours fragility over any unwarranted claim to certainty,” said the citation.
“His buildings 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.”
The citation continued: “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 most recognisable work is perhaps a black house created between 2010 and 2012.
Called House for the Poem of the Right Angle, based on a painting series by French architect Le Corbusier, the house was enclosed in a dramatic woodland in Vilches, Chile and featured protruding skylights and monitor windows.
However, despite the almost spooky facade, an interior courtyard and light wood detailing made the house seem surprisingly expansive.
The structure demonstrated Radić’s commitment to the tension between the imposing exterior of architecture and the delicate nature of the people who live among it.
“Architecture exists between large, massive, and enduring forms – structures that stand under the sun for centuries, waiting for our visit—and smaller, fragile constructions –fleeting as the life of a fly, often without a clear destiny under conventional light,” said Radić.
“Within this tension of disparate times, we strive to create experiences that carry emotional presence, encouraging people to pause and reconsider a world that so often passes them by with indifference.”
In recent years, Radić has worked on increasingly larger scales. In 2018, he designed the Teatro Regional del Bíobío in Concepción, Chile alongside architects Eduardo Castillo and Gabriela Medrano.
The structure featured a PTFE laid over a zig-zagging concrete structure.
The timing of Thursday’s announcement came as a surprise to many due to the ongoing controversy surrounding the Prize, after revelations that the Pritzker Foundation’s director, Tom Pritzker, heavily featured the email cache relating to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In late February, the Pritzker Foundation, which administers the prize, announced the award would be delayed.
The prize was established in 1979 by Tom Pritzker’s father, Jay Pritzker, of the Hyatt Hotel Corporation, from which Tom Pritzker resigned following the revelations.
However, the relevance of the prize remains clear.
Last year, the prize was won by Chinese architect Liu Jiakun.
Photo courtesy of Priztker Architecture Prize.
Source: dezeen.com (Ben Dreith)