Recent Lecture: Smiljan Radic (Chile)
Thu 3/20, 6pm @ EMPAC
SMILJAN RADIC: “SURROUNDINGS”
Smiljan Radic was born in Santiago de Chile in 1965. He studied at the Catholic University of Chile’s School of Architecture, where he graduated in 1989. Later, he studied at the Istituttto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, Italy, travelled for three years on and off, and finally opened is own office in Santiago in 1995.
In 2001 he was named the Best Under 35 Years Old Architect by the Chile College of Architects, and in 2009 he was appointed as an honorary member of the American Institute of Architect, USA.
[Smiljan Radic] has forged a reputation in South America for building structures of startling originality that play on their material counterpoints, combining natural and artificial, roughly hewn with smoothly polished. From luxurious villas that cling to the cliffs of the Chilean coast, to larger museum and civic centre projects, his work contrasts raw geological power with the delicacy of things that feel woven or grown. It is organic, but in way that is as awkward and brutish as it is sumptuous and refined. It is touchy feely – but you might get scratched. (THE GUARDIAN 3/12.)
Smiljan Radic has lectured extensively and has mounted several architectural exhibitions of his work, including ‘Global Ends’, at the Ma Gallery in Tokio, 2010; ‘People Meet in Architecture’, with sculptor Marcela Correa at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, 2010; and ‘An Orange Noise’ at the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012.
He was recently chosen to design Serpentine’s 2014 Summer Pavilion (London, UK). After a decade of big-name startarchitects, he is the youngest and least-known architect to be selected for this prestigious temporary commission.
His projects have been published in international architectural magazines such as 2G, Revista Internacional de Arquitectura, a+u, ARQ, Casabella, Detail, Lotus and Quaderns d’ Arquitectura i Urbanisme, and also has been published in two Spanish digests by the Escuela Técnico Superior de la Universidad de Navarra, and in Chile by Ediciones ARQ. In 2013, El Croquis magazine dedicated a special volume (# 167) to his work.
Radic belongs to the first generation of Chilean architects to have a global presence. …. Seeming both natural and foreign to their sites, his projects are equally designed and found objects, finished as much as ongoing. When talking about his work, Radic is less likely to describe the projects than to discuss ideas surrounding them, the effects they produce, and the way they connect to the larger world. It is precisely Radic’s bricoleur-like range of references and his relaxed approach to style, language, and method that make his work so relevant in architecture today. (Santiago Castillo, BOMB magazine, Winter 200)
//