Smiljan Radić Clarke

Biography

In 2014 a white, translucent shell of fibreglass stood in Kensington Gardens. It rested on large quarry stones. This was the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, designed by the Chilean architect Smiljan Radić.

He was born on 21 June 1965 in Santiago, the son of Smiljan Radic Piraíno and Cora Clarke Ramírez. His paternal grandfather emigrated to Chile in 1919 from the island of Brač (now in Croatia), and his mother’s family comes from the United Kingdom. In 1989 Radić graduated in architecture from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He then studied at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, from 1990 to 1992: by some accounts he studied history, by others aesthetics. In 1994 he won the international competition for Platia Eleftherias square in Heraklion, Crete, and took on the project together with Nicolas Skutelis and Flavio Zanon. He opened his own studio in Santiago in 1995. It has stayed small, but it works both in Chile and abroad. While still a student he met the sculptor Marcela Correa; several projects were made with her, among them Casa Chica in Vilches (1997), a small house in the Andes of central Chile.

In 2000 Radić won the competition for the Barrio Cívico de Concepción (the Civic Quarter of Concepción), and in 2001 the Colegio de Arquitectos de Chile, the Chilean professional association of architects, named him the best architect under 35. His early works were mostly houses: Pite House in Papudo (2003–2005), Copper House 2 in Talca (2004–2005), and the Mestizo restaurant in Santiago. In 2007 he was a visiting professor at the University of Texas.

From 2010 his name was heard more often in exhibition halls. At the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010 he showed, with Correa, the installation “The Boy Hidden in a Fish”. There were exhibitions in Tokyo (2010, 2013, 2016), at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Hiroshima (2012, “Un Ruido Naranjo”), and in Zagreb (2015). His House for the Poem of the Right Angle, a house in Vilches, was shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in the exhibition “Endless House” in 2015–2016. He has built a bus stop in Krumbach (Austria), the extension of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art (2013), the Vik winery in Millahue, and NAVE, a performing arts centre in Santiago (2015), for which an old nineteenth-century town house was rebuilt. He won the competition for the Regional Theatre of Bío-Bío in Concepción in 2011, together with Gabriela Medrano and Eduardo Castillo; the theatre opened in 2018. Later came Casa Prisma (2020), London Sky Bubble (2021) and the Guatero pavilion for the 2023 Chile Architecture Biennial. In 2017 Radić founded in Santiago the Fundación de Arquitectura Frágil (the Fragile Architecture Foundation), which organizes exhibitions and research on experimental architecture.

Critics describe his method this way: he does not repeat a ready-made language but approaches each object anew. Concrete, stone and glass sit beside polymers and industrial membranes; his buildings often look unfinished, and he himself compares short-lived structures to the “life of a fly”. I think the London pavilion shows this better than any other work: heavy stones hold up a light shell that looks as if the wind could carry it off.

Awards followed one after another: the Design Vanguard award of Architectural Record (2008), the Croatian Oris Award (2015), the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2018), and the Grand Prize of the Pan-American Architecture Biennial of Quito for the Bío-Bío theatre (2022). Since 2009 he has been an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, and since 2020 a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 2026 he was awarded the National Architecture Award of Chile together with Alejandro Aravena. In March of that year the Pritzker Prize jury, chaired by Aravena, noted that in his work fragility is valued above any claim to dogmatic certainty. Radić became the second Chilean to receive the prize.