An installation view of Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola's project, 'Monolith Controversies,' at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014.
An installation view of Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola's project, 'Monolith Controversies,' at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014. - In the early '70s, the Soviet Union donated a pre-fab panel factory to Chile. Alonso and Palmarola located one of the first panels ever made and put it on display. It was signed by Chilean president Salvador Allende. © Nico Saieh / Plataforma Arquitectura

Since 2009, Chile’s Alejandro Aravena, founding partner of Elemental, a design firm specializing in public-interest projects, has occupied a highly influential post on the jury for the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s most prestigious award. The mediagenic architect — who sports a spiky crown of salt-and-pepper hair — has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, delivered a TED talk and been an innovator in the design of affordable housing and constructed buildings in Chile, Mexico and the U.S. He is now at work on his first project in China: a campus for the pharmaceutical giant Novartis.

Other Chilean architects are garnering recognition. At the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola won the Silver Lion award. It was the second Chilean win in three biennials. And in 2014, Smiljan Radic built the annual pavilion at London’s Serpentine Gallery, an honor that previously went to Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry. The London Evening Standard described Radic’s craggy-yet-luminous doughnut structure, supported by boulders, as “an idea that looks forward as well as back.”

“In Chile, to be an architect means being involved in construction, in finding the material, of being on-site,” Radic says. “When I did the Serpentine, I worked in the same way. I went to the quarry to look for stones.”

The designs are as singular as the architects — each speaking to different questions of history and form, and each bearing different influences, from Kahn to Le Corbusier to the Portuguese Modernist Alvaro Siza.