Alejandro Aravena2016 LARUATTE

Alejandro Aravena, seen as one of the great names of young architects, has produced great works in his own office, but with ELEMENTAL he stands to make great projects of public interest and social impact, an important issue for many cities.

Alejandro AravenaAravena is best known for his work with "do tank" Elemental, an architecture group that aims to tackle poverty and eliminate slums using a participatory approach that engages local communities in early stages of the design process

It is the second time in three years that the Pritzker jury has chosen an architect who is best-known for humanitarian design rather than statement architecture.

Alejandro Aravena Alejandro Aravena was born on June 22, 1967, in Santiago, Chile. He graduated as an architect from the Universidad Católica de Chile in 1992. In 1994, he established his own practice, Alejandro Aravena Architects. Since

2001 he has been leading ELEMENTAL, a “Do Tank” focusing on projects of public interest and social impact, including housing, public space, infrastructure, and transportation.

working mainly on institutional buildings. Since 2001  They began working in projects of low-cost housing that due to its incremental

nature required participatory processes.  From 2000 until 2005 he was professor at Harvard University, where together

with engineer Andres Iacobelli he found the social housing initiative ELEMENTAL, an Urban Do Tank, partner of Universidad Catolica and Chilean Oil Company Copec.

Alejandro Aravena He was a member of the Pritzker jury from 2009 to 2015. After the 2010 earthquake and tsunami that hit Chile, they were called

to work in the reconstruction of the city of Constitución where they had to integrate all the previous experiences. The approach they developed proved to be useful for other cases where city design was used to solve social and political conflicts. At the moment they keep on expanding into new fields of action.

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY If there's any power in design, that's the power of synthesis. The more complex the problem, the more the need for simplicity(INCREMENTAL Design)

there's a problem that I would call the "3S" menace: The scale, speed, and scarcity of means with which we will have to respond to this phenomenon has no precedence in history Favelas and Slum humanitarian architecture basically means architecture designed for those in need.  It is “seeking architectural solutions to humanitarian crises and bringing professional design services to communities in need.”

Aravena’s Qoutes

“I really appreciate having been trained in an environment of scarcity. Somehow it’s a very efficient filter against what’s not strictly necessary. There’s not enough money, not enough time, to answer with tools that are not exactly the ones you need for that question.” Alejandro Aravena

“It’s a social and political problem, but we can use design to address these issues.” Alejandro Aravena

Design Philosophy

House for a Sculptor Aravena didn’t always have such faith. Shortly

after graduating in the early 1990s, following a succession of “shitty clients … restaurants, bars, shops”, he got so disillusioned that he quit architecture and opened a bar. “I lived by night, waking up at 5pm and going to bed at 10am,” he says. When he eventually decided to resume his career, he got lucky. A sculptor asked him to design her house, and this was when he learned the lesson that perhaps makes him so intolerant of what’s on offer at the biennale. “I wanted to have that kind of freedom,” he recalls, “so I said, ‘Don’t pay me, but allow me to do whatever I want.’ I think I was rigorous enough, but it was still a completely stupid thing.”

Sculptor House, Santiago, Chile

12 Top Projects by Alejandro Aravena Alejandro Aravena took home the top prize in architecture this year, but

those not involved in architecture might not recognize the name of this socially conscious Chilean architect. That’s most likely because the 41st Pritzker Prize laureate doesn’t pride his work on being flashy—his projects are modest, practical, and prioritizes process and long-term viability over an eye-catching facade. The best example can be seen in his practice of “incremental design,” a process where he and his team create half-finished social housing structures to give residents the chance to complete the rest to their own needs. To get you better acquainted with Aravena’s pioneering work, we’ve rounded up 12 of his top projects, from social housing to private buildings.

UC Innovation Center in Santiago

Recently awarded “Design of the Year” by London’s Design Museum, the UC Innovation Center is a striking sculptural triumph in Santiago. Rather than sheathe the building in glass, like most architects would, Aravena instead created the building from concrete and carved site-specific openings, including a hollow-out atrium, out of its monolithic mass. The concrete exterior and carefully placed openings help prevent overheating, reduce energy consumption, and avoid the greenhouse effect common to all-glass buildings.

UC Innovation Center

Our proposal to accommodate such goals was to design a building in which at least 4 forms of work could be verified: a matrix of formal and informal work crossed by individual and collective ways of encountering people. In addition to that, we thought that face to face contact is unbeatable when one wants to create knowledge, so we multiplied throughout the building the places where people could meet: from the elevator’s lobby with a bench where to sit if you happen to run into somebody that has interesting information to share, to a transparent atrium where you can sneak into what others are doing while circulating vertically, to elevated squares throughout the entire height of the building.

UC Innovation Center

Quinta Monroy Housing project in Iquique

The Quinta Monroy Housing project is Aravena’s first example of “incremental design.” Faced with the task of resettling 100 families, Aravena built rows of affordable social housing structures that were only “half-built.” The completed structures included all the necessities and difficult parts of the home that a normal family would never be able to build on their own, such as the plumbing, kitchen, and bathrooms. The families, who had the freedom to tailor it to their own needs, finished the second half of the structure.

Quinta Monroy Housing project

"What we did was to reframe the problem [of social housing]," Aravena told Chicago Tribune architecture criticBlair Kamin. "We think of 400 square feet not as a small house but as half of a good house. Our priorities are, No. 1, location. We'd rather spend more money on a better location of land. No. 2: We were looking for quality housing. For us, quality didn't mean a bigger house. The families can make their house grow by filling in the unfinished half."

30 housing unit 66 housing unit

Quinta Monroy Housing project

Interior Ground floor Interior Top floor

Villa Verde Housing project in Constitución

The Villa Verde Housing project in the Chilean seaside town of Constitución is a more recent example of Aravena’s “half-finished” houses completed as part of an Elemental project. The post-disaster structures helped locals rebuild their lives following the 2010 earthquake and tsunami

Constitución Seaside Promenade in Constitución

To help boost tourism in Constitución, Aravena was commissioned to develop minimal coastal lookout points along the rocky seaside

Siamese Towers at the San Joaquín Campus

Like their name suggests, the Siamese Towers comprises a pair of conjoined buildings, one housing classrooms and the other comprising office space. The project was one of many Aravena completed for the Universidad Católica de Chile.

We were asked to design a glass tower. Glass is very inappropriate for Santiago’s climate, because it generates green house effect, even though it’s a nice material to resist rain, pollution and aging. So we thought of using glass for what it’s good, on the outside, then do another building inside with efficient energy performance and allow air to flow in between the two. Convection of hot air, creates a vertical wind which is accelerated by the “waists” of the building by Venturi effect, eliminating undesired heat gains before they reach the second building inside.

Siamese Towers

3 problem1. the computers =now that we work on screens, a good space is the one that has achieved agood half-light (to avoid uncomfortable reflections)2.the glass =outer single glass skin (double, reflective and colored glass)

3. the tower.cut the volume in two from the 7th floor up. For each of theif seen from the front, the building was a unique bi-chepalusvolume, but seen as a foreshortened figure, the color difference could show acouple of really vertical figures, that happened to share great part of theirbodies, as if they were Siamese creatures. 

Children's Bicentennial Park in Santiago

Aravena brought a much-needed spot of green to Santiago with the four-hectare Children’s Bicentennial Park, an interactive landscape build on the hillside. The park includes sculptures, jungle gyms, and long walking paths. The park was built as part of a program to celebrate Chile’s bicentennial.

Las Cruces Pilgrim Lookout Point in Jalisco

Completed in 2010, this 148-square-meter concrete lookout point is located along the annual pilgrimage route that traverses the mountain range of Jalisco, Mexico. Located on the highest point of the trail, the kinked structure overlooks beautiful panoramic views of the valley and offers a place of rest

Las Cruces Pilgrim Lookout Point in Jalisco

This lookout point is part of the 117 km Pilgrim Road. Building in a remote place should generate an architecture able to age as if it were a natural element. So, we thought of a kind of hollowed stone, bent to rest calmly on the hill side, and whose only purpose is to offer shadows, cross-ventilation and a view over the path the pilgrims walked for a hundred kilometers to arrive there.

Post-Tsunami Sustainable Reconstruction Plan of Constitución

On February 27, 2010, Chile was ravaged by an 8.8 earthquake and tsunami. Aravena created a master plan to rebuild the city of Constitución. He and his team at Elemental completed the plan in 100 days, which includes improved access to public space and was created with the help of the public. The masterplan is currently still in progress.

St. Edward’s University Dorms in Austin

Aravena fit 300 dorm beds and social areas for the St. Edward’s campus on a narrow lot. Arranged like a cloister, the concrete building, which looks plain from the exterior, encloses a central gathering space surrounded by bright red glass facade.

Novartis Office Building in Shanghai

The Novartis Office Building, currently under construction, was created to “encourage knowledge creation…and foster interaction between the users.” The site-sensitive building responds to the local climate and is built with passive solar principles. The structure is clad in reclaimed brick, while the north facade features openings to let indirect light seep into the offices.

Writer’s Cabin, 2015, Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland

Completed in 2015, this elevated writer’s cabin was built for the Jan Michalski Foundation in Montricher, Switzerland. A sculptural canopy tops the building

Ocho Quebradas House in Los Vilos, Chile

A weekend retreat that’s currently in progress, the Ocho Quebradas House is described as a “retreat where people allow themselves to suspend the conventions of life and go back to more essential living.”

Jury CitationThe younger generation of architects and designers who are looking for opportunities to affect change, can learn from the way Alejandro Aravena takes on multiple roles instead of the singular position of a designer to facilitate a housing project, and by doing so, discovers that such opportunities may be created by architects themselves. Through this approach, he gives the profession of architect a new dimension, which is necessary to respond to present demands and meet future challenges of the field.

Jury Citation The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena has won the 2016 Pritzker

Architecture Prize for work that "epitomizes the revival of a more socially engaged architect.“

In its citation, the jury noted that "few have risen to the demands of practicing architecture as an artful endeavor, as well as meeting today's social and economic challenges. Aravena ... has achieved both, and in doing so has meaningfully expanded the role of the architect.“

The jury cited, among others, five buildings Aravena has designed for his alma mater, the Universidad Catolica de Chile, including its mathematics school, its medical school and, in 2014, its Angelini Innovation Center, an opaque concrete structure with a light-filled glass atrium inside.

"A powerful structure from a distance, it is remarkably humane and inviting," the jury said, noting that the unique design ensures that energy consumption is minimal. The design also includes "many spaces for spontaneous encounters and transparency that enables viewing activity throughout," it said.

Alejandro Aravena’s Speech after winning the Pritzker Award Speaking in Santiago, Aravena said he felt "huge gratitude" upon

receiving the award, which he said was tantamount to a Nobel Prize in his field. He noted the collaborative nature of architecture.

"Architecture is a collective discipline," he said. "It is done, to begin with, with the hands of others, the workers that build the designs, as opposed to a sculptor that makes it with his own hands.“

Aravena mused about what the award would allow him to do in the future. "It gives you a sensation of great freedom," he said. "The road to the future is not written, and that sensation of going on adventures to unexplored territory is in some way the spirit that's inside this office these days — what are we going to do now? We can risk whatever we want, we can take unprecedented challenges, and that really excites us.