Smiljan Radic Clarke, a Chilean architect whose modern buildings can sometimes appear "deliberately unfinished," is the recipient of this year's Pritzker Prize, considered the Nobel of architecture, organizers said Thursday.
The 60-year-old native of Santiago creates "optimistic and quietly joyful" structures, the jury said in its citation.
Radic is perhaps best known for his Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London in 2014, a translucent donut-shaped fiberglass shell resting on locally sourced rocks and playing with the relationship between shelter and nature.
His major works also include the Vik Millahue Winery in his home country, set among the Andes mountains and the vineyards. The Teatro Regional del Biobio in Concepcion, Chile, resembles a paper lantern.
"If architecture gives shape to the ways in which people live, Radic's work produces spatial experiences that feel at once surprising and entirely natural," the Pritzker jury said.
"His buildings may 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 panel hailed Radic, who has created buildings and installations across Europe and at home in Chile, for "reminding us that architecture is an art."
The Chilean architect said Thursday that he was utterly surprised by the award, which comes with a $100,000 grant.
It is "a huge honor," he told US broadcaster National Public Radio. "And possibly, in the very near future, a bit of a headache, since it will probably mean being far more exposed than I would like."
- Austere, elemental -
The jury said that Radic "refuses a repeatable architectural language," and his work often appears austere, or elemental, despite its precise engineering and construction.
The House for the Poem of the Right Angle, completed in 2013 and designed by Radic with the sculptor Marcela Correa, is considered an intimate masterpiece -- Its black concrete structure with angular yet graceful forms draws inspiration from lithographs by Le Corbusier.
Radic was born into an immigrant family; his paternal grandparents came from Croatia, while his mother's family hailed from Britain.
He has recounted how, as a student, he narrowly avoided being expelled from the architecture program at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, an experience he described as humiliating but formative.
He completed his training at the prestigious Universita Iuav di Venezia, in Italy, before founding his Santiago firm in 1995, which he has deliberately kept small.
First awarded in 1979 to the modernist Philip Johnson, the Pritzker Architecture Prize has honored many of the profession's most influential figures including IM Pei, Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid.
This year's prize comes at a particularly sensitive time for the Pritzker Foundation, following the revelation of email exchanges between its billionaire director, Thomas Pritzker, and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, long after the latter's 2008 conviction on charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution.
Pritzker resigned as executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation, stating he had "exercised terrible judgment" in maintaining contact with the New York financier, who died in prison in 2019.
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