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For the headline of their recent interview with the 2026 Pritzker Prize 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 read the headline, I was immediately reminded of a quote by Bob Dylan, a lament against critics who, he complains, “dissect[ed]” his songs “like rabbits.” I also thought of Susan Sontag’s landmark 1966 essay “Against Interpretation,” in which she blames interpretation for destroying literary culture in the 20th century. In Sontag’s telling, interpretation takes complex 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 chills down my spine — even though at that time I was not entirely sure what it meant.
In the interview, Radić is less defiant than the headline suggests. The Chilean architect comes across as thoughtful, earnest, and quietly honored by the fact that he was chosen 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 places him in this proud lineage of defiant aesthetes. It also raises fresh questions about how to think about architecture in the digital era.
Smiljan Radić’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion, a fiberglass shell resting on rocks with an interior cafe and seating. Photo by George Rex, CC BY-SA, via Flickr.
Radić explains to Dezeen that he does not want his work to be understood as “a kind of sermon about what is good or bad in architecture.” While he “always wanted [his] work to be part of a global discussion,” he has pointedly eschewed publicity, at least in the digital realm. He has no social media presence, and his firm does not even have a website. Of social media, Radić says, “I am not against it; I simply do not use it, as I do not consider it a useful tool for the kind of work I do. It is as if someone gave you a drill and you felt compelled to make holes everywhere.”
From these statements, it appears that Radić aims to protect his work not only from interpretation but from the memeification that often follows interpretive reduction. To become a meme — something that spreads quickly online — a person or object must first be interpreted, or translated into a readily digestible idea. By this definition, many of the most famous 21st-century architects have been memeified. The curves of Zaha Hadid, the angles of Daniel Libeskind, and the fractured forms of Frank Gehry make for easy shorthand. And it is even easier to slot these ideas into a superficial discourse about architecture based on tidy binaries like modern versus postmodern or vernacular versus global.
However, these kinds of polemical discussions tend to go around in circles. They also hardly ever penetrate the essence of architecture, or what it feels like to experience a space in physical reality. I suspect this is why Radić chooses to stay out of them.
Sontag: “[Interpretation] is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’. It is to turn the world into this world. (This world! As if there could be any other. The world, our world, is depleted and impoverished enough. Away with all the duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.”
The Internet, Smartphones, and now AI are technologies that have deepened the dilemma Sontag described sixty years ago. Never before have people seemed more disconnected from the clouds above their heads and the ground under their feet. An architect — one whose art is the shaping of physical space — is perhaps required, as a matter of creative integrity, to resist such simulacra. This seems to be the implication of Radić’s statements on meaning and technology.
Smiljan Radić’ s Teatro Regional del Biobío, photo courtesy of Cristobal Palma. Image courtesy of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
From a Sontagian standpoint, it is a virtue of Radić’s work that it is hard to describe. As the Pritzker Prize jury wrote in their announcement of the award, “Radić refuses a repeatable architectural language; instead, each project is approached as a singular inquiry, grounded in first principles 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 same idea in less jargony terms, emphasizing that his goal is to craft structures that can evoke moments of heightened awareness: “Architecture exists between large, massive and enduring forms — structures that stand under the sun for centuries, waiting for our visit — and smaller, fragile constructions — fleeting as the life of a fly, often without a clear destiny under conventional light. Within this tension of disparate times, we strive to create experiences that carry emotional presence, encouraging people to pause and reconsider a world that so often passes them by with indifference.”
But what kind of building can “encourage people to pause and reconsider [the] world?” The answer is, of course, all kinds, or no particular kind. The architect’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 terminology, this is an “erotics” of architecture, not a hermeneutics, as the aim is not to convey an idea but to create an experience of aesthetic pleasure. This approach is very 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 celebrated projects. Built mostly underground, into the landscape, a massive fabric roof made from fiberglass membrane allows sunlight to penetrate the interior spaces. Pictured is the famous reflective pool. Photo credit: Andit69**, Bodega VIK espejo de agua, CC BY 4.0
