Smiljan Radić was born in Santiago in 1965 to a family with Croatian and British roots, graduated in architecture from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in 1989 and then studied history at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice. He founded his practice in Santiago in 1995 and has kept it deliberately small. His early houses — Casa Chica in the Andes, built with the sculptor Marcela Correa, then Pite House and Copper House 2 — set fragile, precisely made shells against raw boulders and rough ground, a pairing that has recurred ever since. He built the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London in 2014 as a translucent fibreglass shell resting on quarry stones, and founded the Fundación de Arquitectura Frágil in 2017. He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in March 2026.
