Pritzker Prize 2026: Chile’s Smiljan Radić wins ‘Nobel’ of architecture

Radić's doughnut-shaped Serpentine Pavilion was wrapped in a translucent fiberglass shell. (Iwan Baan/The Pritzker Architecture Prize via CNN Newsource)

Chilean architect Smiljan Radić, whose often-experimental designs include a doughnut-shaped pavilion in London and a restaurant held up by boulders in Santiago, was named the winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize — an award often dubbed the field’s equivalent to a Nobel Prize — on Thursday.

While the 60-year-old’s designs may, at first glance, appear precariously engineered or even unfinished, the award’s jury said they uplifted those who enter, calling his work “optimistic and quietly joyful.”

Radić becomes the fifth Latin American architect to win the prestigious prize in its 47-year history. First presented to modernist pioneer Philip Johnson in 1979, the annual award has since honored many of the profession’s most influential figures, including the late Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas. But recent years have seen juries acknowledge lesser-known architects and figures committed to smaller-scale, or socially-minded, designs.

Founded in 1995, Radić’s eponymous firm has completed over 60 projects spanning housing, arts venues, an award-winning winery and even a bus stop shelter in Austria. But while he has worked across the Americas and Europe, most of the architect’s buildings were completed in his native Chile.

Among the most notable is Teatro del Bíobío, a performing arts venue in the city of Concepción that, by night, radiates warm light through a semi-translucent facade like a paper lantern. He also oversaw a seamless — but no less contemporary — expansion to the 18th-century Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art in the capital Santiago.

Radić juxtaposes manmade and natural materials in thoughtful ways, with structures sometimes embedded in rocky terrain or appearing to emerge from the ground. The roof of his celebrated Restaurant Mestizo, also in the capital city, is supported by huge load-bearing stones from a local quarry; his Pite House, a residence in nearby Papudo, sits nestled on a cliffside that shelters it from prevailing winds.

Speaking to CNN via email ahead of the announcement, Radić said his approach to materials always depends on the context of the site he is designing on. “Naturally, the same material is understood very differently depending on its use and its historical position in a particular place,” he wrote. “Understanding that tension in the different places where I build is what matters in my work.”

Radić’s international profile grew significantly in 2014, when he became one of the youngest architects ever invited to design the Serpentine Pavilion. The annual commission, at the Serpentine Galleries in London’s Kensington Gardens, is considered one of the profession’s most coveted honors (Frank Gehry, Oscar Niemeyer and Hadid were among the star names preceding Radić), and many considered Radić a surprise choice — himself included.

“At the time, it was a big surprise for me to be chosen to build that pavilion,” he said, adding: “Just as receiving this prize now is a surprise.”

His design upended expectations, too: In one of the initiative’s most surreal pavilions to date, he invited visitors into a cocoon-like fiberglass ring positioned on large rocks that looked like they had been casually scattered around the galleries’ lawn. The resulting praise had a significant impact on Radić’s career, he said.

In the years since, he completed work in Croatia, Italy and the US, where he designed a flagship store for fashion brand Alexander McQueen in Miami, Florida. Elsewhere, he produced an innovative inflatable pavilion for the Chilean Architecture Biennial in 2023, and currently has projects underway in the UK, Spain, Switzerland and Albania, including a residential tower complex.

The variety of these designs show Radić to be an architect who defies categorization — and one who intentionally eschews a signature style. “Style sometimes means having a continuous line of solutions across a wide range of really different projects — a filter that produces a certain formal signature,” he explained.

“Personally, I find that boring; at least it is something I always try to avoid. I prefer to resolve projects case by case, creating places that can lead people to think about their material reality and their memory in a different way, from another point of view.”

This year marks 10 years since his compatriot Alejandro Aravena became the first Chilean to win the Pritzker Prize. It was an achievement that Radić said had a “major effect” on the country’s architects. “I think it created a kind of shared idea around which many of them felt included in the same conversation from other latitudes,” he said of Aravena’s victory in 2016. “Now the same thing might happen again, I hope.”

Aravena, who currently chairs the Pritzker Prize’s jury, returned the compliment, commending Radić for operating in “unforgiving circumstances, from the edge of the world, with a practice of just a few collaborators.” The former laureate’s statement also praised Radić’s “radical originality” and for “making the unobvious obvious.”

The annual prize, which was founded by members of the family behind Hyatt Hotels, is sponsored by the Hyatt Foundation and modeled on the Nobel Prize. Organizers briefly delayed this year’s announcement after files released by the US Justice Department revealed then-executive chairman Tom Pritzker’s association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

Although not accused of wrongdoing, Pritzker stepped down from his role at the hotel chain last month, saying he “exercised terrible judgment in maintaining contact” with Epstein and Maxwell. Award organizers said he would now also “step aside from matters relating to the Prize,” to ensure it “remains focused on architectural excellence.”

Asked if he took the matter into consideration when accepting his award, Radić said that the composition of the jury — which in addition to Aravena included former laureates Anne Lacaton and Kazuyo Sejima, as well as US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and the Yale School of Architecture’s Dean, Deborah Berke, among others — guaranteed the prize’s integrity.

“For more than 30 years, my obsession has been architecture,” he added. “I continue to believe that architecture is a positive act, and I continue to believe that the Pritzker Prize remains part of that positive act, despite the circumstances.”

Radić will be awarded a $100,000 grant and will receive a bronze medal at a ceremony later this year.