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For the heading of their recent interview with the 2026 Pritzker Reward winner Smiljan Radić Clarke, Dezeen pulled a banger of a quote: “There is no message in what I do.” This type of sentiment has a long history. When I check out the headline, I was immediately advised of a quote by Bob Dylan, a lament against critics who, he grumbles, “dissect [ed] his tunes “like bunnies.” I also thought of Susan Sontag’s landmark 1966 essay “Versus Interpretation,” in which she blames interpretation for ruining literary culture in the 20th century. In Sontag’s informing, analysis takes intricate works of art and reduces them into flat messages. “In place of a hermeneutics,” Sontag asserts at the end of the essay, “we need an erotics of art.” When I first read this sentence in high school, it sent out chills down my spine– even though at that time I was not entirely sure what it suggested.
In the interview, Radić is less defiant than the headline suggests. The Chilean architect comes across as thoughtful, earnest, and silently honored by the truth that he was picked as this year’s Pritzker laureate. He is not a barn burner like Dylan or Sontag. But still, his resistance to attributing a message to his work positions him in this happy family tree of bold aesthetes. It also raises fresh questions about how to think of architecture in the digital period.
Smiljan Radić’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion, a fiberglass shell resting on rocks with an interior coffee shop and seating. Image by George Rex, CC BY-SA, by means of Flickr.
Radić describes to Dezeen that he does not want his work to be understood as “a type of sermon about what is excellent or bad in architecture.” While he “always wanted [his] work to be part of an international conversation,” he has specifically shunned publicity, a minimum of in the digital realm. He has no social media existence, and his firm does not even have a site. Of social media, Radić states, “I am not against it; I merely do not utilize it, as I do not consider it a helpful tool for the kind of work I do. It is as if somebody provided you a drill and you felt forced to make holes everywhere.”
From these declarations, it appears that Radić intends to secure his work not only from interpretation but from the memeification that often follows interpretive decrease. To become a meme– something that spreads out rapidly online — a person or things need to first be translated, or equated into a readily absorbable concept. By this definition, much of the most famous 21st-century architects have actually been memeified. The curves of Zaha Hadid, the angles of Daniel Libeskind, and the fractured types of Frank Gehry make for easy shorthand. And it is even simpler to slot these ideas into a shallow discourse about architecture based on neat binaries like contemporary versus postmodern or vernacular versus worldwide.
However, these sort of polemical discussions tend to walk around in circles. They also seldom penetrate the essence of architecture, or what it feels like to experience a space in physical truth. I believe this is why Radić picks to stay out of them.
Sontag:” [Interpretation] is the revenge of the intelligence upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world– in order to establish a shadow world of ‘meanings’. It is to turn the world into this world. (This world! As if there might be any other. The world, our world, is depleted and impoverished enough. Away with all the duplicates of it, up until we once again experience more instantly what we have.”
The Internet, Smartphones, and now AI are innovations that have actually deepened the issue Sontag explained sixty years earlier. Never before have people appeared more detached from the clouds above their heads and the ground under their feet. A designer– one whose art is the shaping of physical area– is perhaps needed, as a matter of imaginative integrity, to withstand such simulacra. This seems to be the implication of Radić’s statements on significance and innovation.
Smiljan Radić’s Teatro Regional del Biobío, photo thanks to Cristobal Palma. Image courtesy of the Pritzker Architecture Reward.
From a Sontagian standpoint, it is a virtue of Radić’s work that it is tough to describe. As the Pritzker Prize jury composed in their statement of the award, “Radić declines a repeatable architectural language; instead, each job is approached as a singular questions, grounded in first concepts and informed by noncontinuous history. Context, use and anthropological awareness take precedence. Site is understood not only in physical terms, but also as a convergence of history, social practice, and political circumstance.”
Radić puts the very same idea in less jargony terms, highlighting that his goal is to craft structures that can evoke moments of heightened awareness: “Architecture exists in between large, huge and enduring kinds– structures that stand under the sun for centuries, waiting on our see– and smaller, fragile constructions– short lived as the life of a fly, often without a clear destiny under traditional light. Within this tension of diverse times, we strive to create experiences that carry psychological presence, encouraging people to stop briefly and reconsider a world that so frequently passes them by with indifference.”
But what type of building can “motivate individuals to stop briefly and reevaluate [the] world?” The response is, naturally, all kinds, or no specific kind. The designer’s role is to address each individual project with care and attention and to hope that something of this profound intentionality comes through in the experience of the space itself. In Sontag’s terms, this is an “erotics” of architecture, not a hermeneutics, as the aim is not to convey a concept however to produce an experience of aesthetic pleasure. This approach is really welcome in our mediated, memeified, and polemical age.
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Cover Image: The Winery at VIK in San Vincent, Chile, is one of Smiljan Radić Clarke’s most popular tasks. Constructed mostly underground, into the landscape, a huge fabric roof made from fiberglass membrane allows sunshine to penetrate the interior areas. Visualized is the famous reflective pool. Picture credit: Andit69 **, Bodega VIK espejo de agua, CC BY 4.0