Projects such as the Casa para o Poema do Ângulo Reto were highlighted by the jury
Chilean architect Smiljan Radić Clarke, known for his experimental work and originality, is the winner of the 2026 Pritzker Prize, the world’s most important architecture prize, the organization announced this Thursday.
The Pritzker Prize jury praised the ability of Radić Clarke – author of projects such as the House for the Poem of the Right Angle, in Chile, and the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, in the United Kingdom – to make the “non-obvious obvious”, creating concrete realities where people can value the environment in a renewed way.
Smiljan Radić Clarke, the 55th laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, is the founder of the studio bearing his name, created in 1995, and a practice developed over more than three decades creating cultural institutions, civic spaces, commercial buildings, private residences and installations in Chile, Albania, Austria, Croatia, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
In justification, the award jury states about the 60-year-old architect: “Through a set of works positioned at the crossroads of uncertainty, material experimentation and cultural memory, Smiljan Radić privileges fragility to the detriment of any unjustified claim to certainty.”
“His buildings appear temporary, unstable or deliberately unfinished — almost on the verge of disappearing — but they provide a structured, optimistic and quietly joyful shelter, embracing vulnerability as an intrinsic condition of lived experience,” he adds, in the official statement.
