Smiljan Radić Clarke was named the newest Pritzker Prize-winner — an award often called the Nobel of architecture — Thursday morning.

Was he surprised by his win?

“Yes, completely,” the Chilean architect told NPR in an email. “[It’s] a huge honor. 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.”

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Smiljan Radić Clarke

Tom Welsh for The Pritzker Architecture Prize

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Tom Welsh for The Pritzker Architecture Prize

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The designer, known professionally as Smiljan Radić, is not exactly underexposed. But he is not as well known internationally as earlier Pritzker winners, such as Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei. Radić, who is 60 and the second Chilean architect to win the award, has designed dozens of buildings that have earned him a formidable reputation in artistic and intellectual circles. The New York Times described him as “a rock star among architects” in 2014, after his contribution to London’s prestigious Serpentine Pavilion.

For that annual installation that showcases cutting-edge architects, Radić designed a glowing rotund pod, almost alien in appearance, perched upon weathered quarry stones. Architecture critics were captivated.

“Seeming to belong at once to a world of science fiction and to a primordial past, the pavilion could well serve as the film set for a post-apocalyptic drama,” wrote Ellis Woodman in his review for The Telegraph. “And yet… it also invites association with the use of ruins and grottoes in the eighteenth century English landscape garden…. What is most captivating about Radić’s heroically peculiar pavilion is the way that it seems to stand out of time.”

Radić grew up in an immigrant family in Santiago. His father’s parents came from Croatia, and his mother’s from the United Kingdom. Although he colloquially uses his father’s surname, he told Pritzker officials upon winning the prize that he wanted to honor his mother by including her last name in the official announcement.

As a student, Radić nearly failed out of the architecture program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Later, he described the humiliating experience as formative, enabling him to travel and study history. While in college, he met sculptor Marcela Correa, who became his wife and close collaborator. Among the numerous works they’ve created together is the celebrated House for the Poem of the Right Angle, a secluded house in the woods of Vilches, Chile, completed in 2013.

Exterior and interior views of House for the Poem of the Right Angle, 2013, Vilches, Chile

Cristobal Palma; Gonzalo Puga/The Pritzker Architecture Prize

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Cristobal Palma; Gonzalo Puga/The Pritzker Architecture Prize

A dramatic mishmash of stark angles and sinuous bulges, the black concrete structure was inspired by an abstract painting by Le Corbusier. The interior is open and airy, encased in cedar and stone.

“House for the Poem of the Right Angle signifies contemplative retreat,” the Pritzker committee wrote. “with thoughtfully placed openings, oriented upward to capture light and time, encouraging stillness and introspection.”

NAVE, Performing Arts Center, 2015, Santiago, Chile

Cristobal Palma/The Pritzker Architecture Prize

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Radić’s other notable works include several performing arts spaces in Chile, including the NAVE arts hall in Santiago and Teatro Regional del Bío Bío in Concepción, which earned him accolades and awards. The Pritzker jury called the theater “a carefully engineered semi-translucent envelope [that] modulates light and supports acoustic performance through restraint. Construction becomes a kind of storytelling, where texture and mass carry as much meaning as form.”

Vik Millahue Winery, 2013, Millahue, Chile

Cristobal Palma/The Pritzker Architecture Prize

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The view from inside the Vik Millahue Winery, 2013, Millahue, Chile

Cristobal Palma/The Pritzker Architecture Prize

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Cristobal Palma/The Pritzker Architecture Prize

From certain angles, his VIK winery in Millahue, Chile looks like a giant piece of agricultural equipment. It was, Radić said, intended to reflect the realities of winemaking, rather than a romance with the fermented grape. During an onstage lecture for the Architecture Foundation in 2023, Radić credited industrial process and chemistry as inspiration. “It’s not really about some concept I don’t like, the idea of terroir,” he said. “It’s a lot of myth.”

In recent years, Radić has also collaborated closely with the high fashion brand Alexander McQueen, designing stores in Miami, Las Vegas, London and Dubai. Yet the Pritzker jury noted that his buildings “invite interpretation, rather than consumption.”

This year’s jury was chaired by Alejandro Aravena, who became the first Chilean to win the Pritzker in 2016. His admiration for his countryman was evident in a Pritzker statement.

“In every work, he is able to answer with radical originality, making the unobvious obvious,” he wrote of Radić. “He reverts back to the most irreducible basic foundations of architecture, exploring at the same time, limits that have not yet been touched. Developed in a context of unforgiving circumstances, from the edge of the world, with a practice of just a few collaborators, he is capable of bringing us to the innermost core of the built environment and the human condition.”

In February, the Pritzker Prize itself came under scrutiny when it became public that Tom Pritzker, the director of the foundation that awards the prize, had been in frequent communication with Jeffrey Epstein. Tom Pritzker is the son of Jay A. Pritzker, who established the prize with his wife Cindy in 1979. (The elder Pritzker died in 1999.)

The family had made a fortune in the hotel industry. Tom Pritzker stepped down as executive chairman of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation, though he remains the chairman of The Hyatt Foundation. A spokesperson for the Pritzker Prize told the New York Times that the Hyatt Foundation protected the prize from outside influence and its financial support enabled the jury “to remain assured in the strength of its process and focus entirely on the celebration of architectural excellence.”

The prize bestows $100,000 on the winner, as well as a bronze medallion.

“This sad moment in history is not the best circumstance in which to receive an award,” Radić told NPR in an email. He was responding to a question about the importance of architecture during a moment when so many important buildings are being destroyed around the world in conflicts and wars.

“The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra once wrote in the 1940s that ‘the sky is falling apart,’ and today we might add that the earth itself seems to be cracking,” he wrote. “Still, I believe that architecture is a positive act — it helps create concrete realities where people can value their surroundings in a different way.”

There’s a famous scene in Betty Smith’s bestselling coming-of-age novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in which Smith describes the relationship her protagonist, 11-year-old Francie Nolan, has with her local public library: “Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world.”

I couldn’t help but think of little Francie Nolan – who, like Smith, grew up in the tenements of Brooklyn in the early 20th century and aimed, as a young girl, to read every book she could find – as I tore through librarian Jarrett Dapier’s debut young adult graphic novel, Wake Now in the Fire. The book, illustrated by AJ Dungo, is a fictionalized account of real-life events. In 2013, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) suddenly restricted access to Marjane Satrapi’s memoir, Persepolis, without explanation of its decision-making process, in some of the school system’s classrooms. This now world-famous autobiographical work, told in comics, tells the story of a young girl and her family as they endure and witness the struggle and violence of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and all that comes after.

Fictional high schooler Aditi, one of the central characters in Dapier’s book, identifies with little Marji, Persepolis’ precocious, head-strong narrator and protagonist. Like many other students at her high school, Aditi is powerfully affected by the book ban. She describes her experience of moving from Mumbai to Chicago, where the bulk of Wake Now takes place, in terms of her interactions with public libraries. As a young girl in Mumbai, she is allowed to take out only a single book a day. She gets around this strict rule by checking one book out first thing in the morning, reading as quickly and diligently as possible, then returning to take out a new book once the librarians have changed shifts at noon. When Aditi moves to Chicago, a relocation her parents make in part to protect their family’s freedoms, she is astounded to learn that she can check out up to 30 books at a time.

A page from Wake Now in the Fire.

Jarrett Dapier and AJ Dungo/Ten Speed Graphic

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Like Satrapi’s young alter-ego, Aditi, too, has strong-willed parents who encourage their daughter to “think for myself. To learn, and to be free.” But the focus in Dapier’s work, as in Satrapi’s, is not so much on the actions of adults as it is on the effects of those actions on young people and their reactions. In preparation for the book – which stemmed in part from a graduate thesis paper Dapier wrote – the author interviewed students at Lane Technical College Preparatory High School in Chicago. This is the school that acted as the basis for the fictionalized high school in the book. The students at Lane Tech were at the frontlines of reporting on and resisting the Persepolis ban. Indeed two seniors, who were at the center of many related activities at the time, appeared in a March 2013 episode of Chicago Tonight to eloquently summarize what this experience had meant to them and why they had chosen, essentially for the first time in their lives, to organize a protest in response to events. “It’s time for us to have our voices heard,” senior Katie McDermott told the press.

The plot of Wake Now in the Fire moves seamlessly between different characters, students affected in all sorts of ways by the pulling of the book. The student journalists investigate CPS’ actions, focusing, too, on gathering impact statements from as many students and teachers as they can find, and disseminating that information to the wider public. Meanwhile, members of the banned book club at school, among others, plan actions, like a walk out, to demonstrate their objection to the CPS order. Others, like Aditi, find themselves newly invested in taking on leadership roles in their communities. But these are high schoolers, too, who are dealing with all the issues and conflicts that unfold in day-to-day life. They worry about their grades and getting into college; they struggle with family matters; they bicker with one another even as they are learning together how to turn frustration and anger into peaceful, and meaningful, action. Ultimately, in the novel as in life, Persepolis was allowed to remain in CPS libraries, and teachers, with required additional training, can teach the book in 8-10 grade classrooms. The book remains forbidden in CPS classrooms below eighth grade, due to concerns about depictions of violence.

Dapier, in an author’s note, notes how the pulling of the book in 2013 “foreshadows our current moment,” when, according to the American Library Association, targeted attempts to censor books continue to grow. “Censoring literature,” one character in the book, a teacher, explains, “is often where oppression starts.” At the same time, young people, in Iran as well as in the U.S., have energetically, and often at great risk to themselves, taken to the streets in order to stand up for their rights. Through these actions, there’s a sense of melding into something bigger than oneself – “beautiful disappearances,” as one character in the book describes it.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’s Francie Nolan found solace, joy, and possibility in the books she freely took out of the library, then read at her leisure in the shade of an ailanthus tree. Countless readers over the years have identified with the power of that scene. And today, countless young people bravely continue the fight for their rights to have access to such powerful scenes and stories.

I am walking through Dynasty Center, warmed by the morning sun. The season’s rainstorm brought a sky as blue as a newborn’s eyes, but water vapor is still rising from the multicolored canopies. Stalls with vendors selling densely packed sun-faded souvenirs is the Chinatown setting I’ve been walking through for as long as I can remember, from New York up to San Francisco and back to L.A. Turtles the size of chicken nuggets paddling in their little plastic boxes, accompanied by the barks of little mechanical dogs that march stiffly in the same futile direction, beneath the phone chargers, the rows of luggage, and the bamboo clusters peeking over one another in ceramic pots. I am walking past walls of pajamas with Disney characters, then walls of backpacks with Marvel characters. Then there are characters I only vaguely recognize, some I feel real fondness toward but no present desire for, all those Labubus of yesteryear.

I had been driving west through downtown and stopped in Chinatown to wait out the morning congestion in a new café that used to be an old bistro. One thing I don’t think gets mentioned enough about L.A. is all the positive aspects of traffic. Sometimes sitting in the car makes you want to die, but other times the standstill on the freeway is a provocation. It forces you to get out of your car so you can really look at a place and forces you to reckon with all that it means.

Walking from my parking spot, I buy cilantro and two star fruits from a bundled-up grandmother eating from her own supply of sticky corn. I wonder if I could pick up a bamboo cluster for a friend, as a birthday present. Perhaps some paper manifestations just in time for the year of the Fire Horse.

But it is then that I realize that perhaps I am being looked at with curiosity. There aren’t many customers inside Dynasty to begin with, but I am the only one that the vendors seem to be watching. I stop and stare back.

“Ni Hao,” one of them finally says, spoken in a warped inquisitive tone, like a test. As if he is really trying to ask: Who are you? Where did you come from? Are you lost? What are you doing here?

These are valid questions. What am I doing here?

Every city I have ever found myself alone in, I have gone directly to its Chinatown. A 12-hour layover in Istanbul, a summer abroad in Paris, a weekend trip to Athens from London, a visit to a friend in Seoul. It’s an impulse I’ve always followed but haven’t questioned too closely. I tell myself I am seeking ease, advice from a familiar face, a cozy bowl of soup that tastes like home.

When my family immigrated from China to America, I was surprised that our first shared apartment was on a street with hardly a single English sign. Alhambra was another one of L.A.’s unofficial Chinatowns where everyone still spoke their native tongue. I grew to love places like that, places where I could get affirmation for just speaking Mandarin without an accent, where I was still allowed back simply because I didn’t draw attention to myself. Over the years, Chinatowns have offered me ephemeral homecomings in city after city without demanding that I make my home there.

One day, and I guess that day has finally come, this ruse stopped working. I no longer fit in the picture. I’m a person who creates characters, imbues them with problems and makes up situations for them to struggle through toward emotional epiphanies. The very real people who live in this part of the city have no use for someone like this. The grandmothers might still smile warmly at me, but they are no longer my grandmothers, and I am no longer a child, so why should they offer me refuge.

My mother was dubious when I told her I wanted to write about Chinatown. She said, “You know how older immigrants talk about Chinatown? Three words: dirty, chaotic, broken.”

Historian Norman M. Klein wrote about one of L.A. Chinatown’s most enduring legends: underneath is a hidden web of tunnels, where sinful, lurid acts were carried out and crimes were committed. For decades this myth was passed on as people were suspicious of what they couldn’t understand. After the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, Chinatown’s Chinese residents were barred from testifying in court, excluding them from courtrooms that were investigating them, and vulnerable to police officers whose official records stated they couldn’t tell them apart.

That original Chinatown was eventually demolished to clear space for Union Station. The replacement was moved just north of Downtown Los Angeles and opened in 1938. It’s an eerily quiet part of city, especially during the day. Its only post office is in danger of closing due to lack of funding, and fliers are posted up on lamp posts asking for financial support from the community. The owner of the small antiques shop will talk to you for hours about every small business that has come and gone on his block. Fridays and Saturdays a group of young Thai chefs and artisans try to draw crowds to eat and shop at their night market on Mei Ling Way. During game nights, hundreds of Dodgers fans will stream in and park before games; perhaps they will eat a big meal together at Yang Chow but then the crowds depart, the rest of the streets stay quiet.

Perhaps it is the neighborhood’s enduring, somewhat mysterious opacity that appeals to a new generation of designers and artists. They’ve opened studios and galleries alongside the stationery store, coffee shops, tea cocktail lounges, fusion restaurants and destination bars that come fully to life only after dark.

A decades-long business owner on Chung King Road told me, “Every couple of years, a new group of people, recently graduated art students usually, come around, rent space and try to revitalize the streets.” In her shop she sells postcards of faraway places with captions like: A BEST SELLER MOVIE BY JACKIE CHAN RUSH HOUR WAS NOT SHOT HERE. There’s a resigned weariness in her voice when she says, “Then they realize we just don’t get the kind of foot traffic it takes to sustain those kinds of businesses, and it goes away.”

I get it. She’s been living in the community for decades and has seen tides of faces come and go. She sounds already disappointed on their behalf, tired of artists whose far-fetched plans never quite materialize.

There’s something about the architectural scale of Los Angeles Chinatown that has always struck me as somewhere between convincingly authentic and strangely artificial. Is the sky too close to the clay tile roofs? Is the sunset too orange? Did someone repaint the mechanical horses for children one too many times and now their eyes look crazed?

It’s hard to walk during the day between Hill and Broadway without feeling like you’re walking in the backdrop of a movie, like a camera from above is about to come in focus and people will appear out of nowhere and set the place into action. Signage for new and defunct art galleries appear with letters roasted dry by the relentless California sun until the edges of words peel away, looking like they were written in calligraphy.

When pitching a TV show around Hollywood a few years ago, I saw the ways media executives’ eyes perked up with approval when I mentioned Chinatown as a setting. Somehow, always a piece of the city, yet to be claimed. Since I’d been finding myself in various Chinatowns both as a liminal space and a state of mind, I told them I’d claim it, even though it was just as mysterious to me. I thought in trying to capture it, I could join the group of people somehow helping to protect it.

I love exploring Chinatown, peeking into the windows of jewelers boasting diamonds and gold and Rolexes, and discovering secret cinemas across the street from death doulas. But it’s also a place that takes care of its elderly inhabitants, whose presence is most urgently felt. Elders get their hearing checked and play mahjongg and practice calligraphy in the shade of empty plazas. Elders in wheelchairs sit in the sun beside decommissioned shopping malls, whose main purpose seems to be to hold adult daycare centers for senior citizens. There do not seem to be sharks circling.

For a long time I wanted to move to Chinatown myself, to live there even without knowing very much about it. I dreamed of my children learning Chinese in the dual language immersion program of the local elementary. Before moving back to L.A., I had lived in a tenement building in New York’s Chinatown. I miss having claim over a piece of that city that other people found indecipherable. I miss a place that did not make me feel ashamed about my most outlandish yearnings and dreams.

There are many places in this city that real estate developers have found more appetizing. Communities with futuristic dispensaries and start-up athleisure. Thriving shopping malls and long lines around the block for viral beverages. Not here in Chinatown, but perhaps this place is holding out for something better, something more real.

My friend Joseph Lee has his painting studio on the second floor of a strip mall plaza, his half-squeezed tubes of paint line the walls from end to end. On the surface, here is another Chinatown mall whose decommissioned retail and office spaces have stood empty for years. But in recent years, they’ve been turned into studios for architects and designers and other creatives whose floor-to-ceiling windows face one another under Chinatown’s bright sky.

Joe told me he followed his heroes to Chinatown. The first one being Bruce Lee, who once had a martial arts studio in an unmarked building (which Joe found using a now-defunct History Channel app). Then there’s one of his favorite living painters, Henry “Chinatown” Taylor himself, whose gallery and former home are still just around the corner.

At night, Mandarin Plaza buzzes with conversation from the tea shop in the center. On weekends, sometimes a jazz band performs behind the stairwell and revelers dance in the eaves. The sidewalk in front of Café Triste is often so crowded with impeccably dressed patrons, it’s difficult to hear your own thoughts while walking by. Its owner can’t keep the customers sitting down long enough to eat his creative menu, so he thinks he must start serving fries.

My mother brought me to this country as a child and toiled with a ferocious determination that afforded our family the means to move farther and farther from the place we started. Thinking back, it was precisely because she was too busy working to focus on me that I was given the freedom to pursue my own fantasies of becoming a writer.

Chinatown is a part of Los Angeles built by immigrants who were chased, moved aside, distrusted — a place with a violent history it has continuously tried to shake. And yet it remains in a state of reinvention, making it an ideal place for dreamers to impose their improbable dreams, to make bets on themselves as artists, as creatives, as immigrants. Even when those dreams don’t quite hold, it continues to allow people to harbor hope for the next evolution. In that sense, Chinatown carries its own poetic legacy, the myth that deserves to endure.

Xuan Juliana Wang is author of the short story collection “Home Remedies” and assistant professor of English at UCLA.