Interior Design

chilean architect smiljan radić clarke receives the 2026 pritzker architecture prize for his atmospheric, material-driven architecture.

The post pritzker prize awarded to chilean architect smiljan radić clarke appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Buildings associated with death, conceived or inspired by funerary rituals and practices, have given rise throughout history to some of architecture’s most significant achievements. The desire to preserve memory has always inspired the design of funerary spaces that explore territories of ambiguity: between earth and sky; light and matter; the telluric and the ethereal; the present and the timeless. In their materials, textures, scales, and forms, these buildings resist the passage of time and assert themselves as timeless constructions.

This 2008 Colonial Revival home in Vienna, Virginia, had a kitchen that felt stuck in the past. Short white cabinets and a busy tile backsplash clashed with the home’s updated interiors. The homeowners, who had previously worked with Winn Design + Bui…

drawing on the tradition of the architectural folly, the pavilion reimagines the historic garden typology as a contemporary gathering space.

The post MARC FORNES / THEVERYMANY’s cocooned aluminum pavilion rises in north carolina park appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Lantern House sits quietly among the oaks of Austin’s Bouldin Creek; a study in light, material, and restraint. The design transforms a densely wooded urban lot into a private sanctuary, where filtered daylight and layered transparency define the rhythm of daily life.

Smiljan Radić Clarke, the 2026 Pritzker Prize winner, is a contemporary Chilean architect known for his experimental approach to design, with a practice that balances the elemental with the intimate, the monumental with the fragile. Over the course of more than three decades, Radić has developed an architecture that resists repetition and conventional stylistic categorization, favoring instead deeply site-specific, materially attuned, and culturally reflective interventions.

The 2026 Pritzker Price Award has been awarded this year to the Chilean architect of Croatian descent, Smiljan Radić Clarke. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1965, his practice evokes a geography of extremes, shaped by the tectonic tension between the staggering weight of the Andes and the seismic instability of the territory. After graduating from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and pursuing further studies in aesthetics in Venice, Smiljan Radić Clarke established his base in Santiago. From there, he has developed one of the most singular visions in contemporary architecture. His work privileges the intensity of the moment through a fragile architecture. Within it, the building operates as a temporary and tactile refuge that places the spectator in a state of aesthetic uncertainty, oscillating between ancestral ruin and avant-garde artefact.

Chilean architect Smiljan Radić Clarke has been announced as the laureate of the 2026 Pritzker Architecture Prize, regarded as one of the highest honors in the field of architecture. The award recognizes Radić for a body of work that explores architecture through material experimentation, spatial perception, and a careful engagement with landscape and context. Born in Santiago, Chile, where he continues to live and work, Radić leads the practice Smiljan Radić Clarke, established in 1995. As the second Chilean to receive the prize, after Alejandro Aravena in 2016, he joins a distinguished list of previous laureates, including Liu Jiakun in 2025, Riken Yamamoto in 2024, David Chipperfield in 2023, and Diébédo Francis Kéré in 2022.

Amid the rapid build-out of data centres and AI economies across the Greater Bay Area—and alongside the celebration of AI as a tool and “author,” as featured in 2025 Hong Kong–Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Hong Kong)—a parallel question becomes unavoidable: how do the planning and construction of AI infrastructure actually begin to shape everyday life? Many of the facilities already built remain intentionally distant from daily experience. The “cloud” may be marketed as immaterial, but its architecture is profoundly physical: high-power, high-heat, service-heavy environments that are often sited in remote or low-density areas to take advantage of lower land costs and to minimize friction with nearby communities. Security and risk management further reinforce this logic. Data centres hold sensitive, privileged information—corporate assets, legal records, government and institutional data—and remoteness becomes part of their operating model, keeping the infrastructures of AI both spatially and socially out of sight.