Smiljan Radić is a Chilean architect who has stood out internationally for his enigmatic works. His practice is marked by experimentation with raw matter and the investigation of its social, sensorial and symbolic meanings, where the interest is concentrated in creating atmospheres that trancend the common sense of architectural visuality. His rhetoric as well as his authorial production, composed of textual and imagistic narratives, evidence the subjective and poetic character of his work, adding an underground ingredient that makes his works directly related to the fields of the imagination, the unconscious and memory. The argument implied here is that in the architecture of Smiljan Radić, or at least in part of it, the function of the real and the function of the unreal merge into an innovative architectural whole. In order to deal with the works of the Chilean architect and his creative processes, we delve into the formation bases of the Chilean architects generation of which Radić is a part. On the other hand, we find in the surrealistic, situationist vanguards and in the set of groups that have been called Radical Architecture, an important part of the practical and theoretical referential that point to a condition of mutual infiltration between the domains of reality and imagination. It is from this point of view that the methods and creative processes of Radić will be investigated. Thus, from the analysis of two relevant works from the beginning of the millennium - Restaurante Mestizo and Casa para El Poema Del Ángulo Recto - we identify and develop themes inherent to the binomial approach to the imagination plus built reality, seeking to draw relationships between its creation processes and construction, and the theoretical reference approach, as well as to identify the effects caused by these works in the scope of experience.