before starting to design go and study how the masters

Before starting to design go and study how the masters have done it. To design is to prefer; there are some that prefer better than others. Learn from them.

-4- -5- studying references

Trip to the Doric Temples in Sicily, Italy, 1993

-7--6-alejandro aravena architects 1st period from 1998 to 2003

This text has to be written in the first-person singular. At the time of this project, I was 30 and had no employees; the office was just myself. Until then, I had only built a 120m2 house for a private client, so I went from that, to a 2,000m2 building for an institution. Architects have to be given an opportunity. Sometimes it’s relatives that commission something. Nobody in my close circle was in the position to build anything so when Fernando Perez, at the time Dean of the School of Architecture at Catholic University suggested my name to design the Mathematics Faculty, it was an opportunity that I knew I was going to grab with tooth and nail.

After a start doing commercial stuff (that luckily enough disappeared) I had on the one hand accumulated some experience in construction (I was building the projects myself) and on the other hand, got out of my system the need to prove all the forms I could do. Having already been exaggerated in the designs for bars, discos, shops, and so on, I could now focus more calmly on choosing only the right moves and operations for the project I had in front of me.

That is why when I was given the brief (offices for mathematicians somewhere close to the old faculty but no specific site), it was kind of obvious that the right move was to blend into the existing and achieve a building with the scale of the campus. Actually, more than the building, I thought the important thing was to get a 150m-long covered portico that protected users of the campus from the rain and the sun. I was asked to add a new building to the existing buildings ones, but I wanted to put into motion a principle of synthesis, more than an addition: 2+1=1

At the user’s level, I remember a first meeting with the mathematicians, where they explained the nature of their work: extremely abstract and complex, cutting-edge knowledge produced in deep concentration in individual offices. The turning point came with a joke at the end of the meeting. They said a mathematician is a machine that transforms coffee into equations. In successive meetings this joke unveiled the importance that informal gathering had for knowledge creation. So the project ended balancing the quiet concentrated work in small cells with opportunities to bump into others, from corridor conversation to the terraces outside the cafeteria.

This was in a way my first project and I was terrified. What if I made a mistake in the size of the stairs? What if the rooms were too small? What if the building leaked? That is why I almost lived on the construction site. I remember seeing the scaffolding and the formwork for the stairs that were about to be filled with poured concrete, tons and tons of concrete being lifted by a crane. And I remember looking at the thing and thinking how on earth did I give only 1.2m to the landing of that stair!? It’s just too narrow. What some months before were lines of black ink drawn at 0.5mm one from each other in a 1:50 plan, now were tons of concrete, dozens of workers and millions of pesos becoming a wall. I never again could draw the same way.

The building went well. Until today it’s very much appreciated by the mathematicians and by passers-by of the campus. It also did not leak. And it ended up as a finalist in the Latin-American version of Mies van der Rohe Award, a crucial thing because, in 2000, it got me an invitation to teach at Harvard. That, and the book Los Hechos de la Arquitectura that had just been published in 1999. At Harvard a completely different and unknown world was waiting for me, the one that led to the foundation of ELEMENTAL.

2+1=1

The Mathematics FacultySantiago, Chile. 1998

Right: In the forefront, Mathematics School south facade. 200m back, Siamese Towers. Far left, the UC Innovation Center.

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In the forefront, the Siamese Towers from 2005. In the back, Angelini Innovation Center, 200m and 10 years away.

-11--10- 2nd period from 2003 to 2010alejandro aravena architects + elemental

first scheme last scheme


The challenge of the project was to allow circulation from different parts of the campus and at the same time keep a sense of unity. In the back, through the main north-south axis, is the Main Building with pitched red roofs.


Above: Rolf Fehlbaum is Chairman Emeritus and active Member of the Board of Directors of Vitra.

Three things can be said about the chair wrapping around this Ayoreo Indian:

First, this man cannot afford anything but this modest piece of cloth as a chair. To know how to design under scarcity of means is relevant.

Second, this man is a nomad; so any other type of chair, even if he had more money, makes no sense. Design has also to be precise.

Third, the piece of cloth is the ultimate limit before the noun (chair) becomes a pure verb (to sit). The design has to become irreducible.

These are the virtues of this chair developed by Ayoreo Indians in Paraguay and a starting point for Chairless.

For the times we are living, it makes sense to do a chair that is economic. It’s time to produce more systematically things that are affordable, yet not disposable. This chair uses state of the art materials and is carefully crafted, but is conceptually tight; so its economy does not come from a process of reducing quality or cutting costs, but rather from defining in the most radical possible way, what is strictly necessary to build a chair.

So let’s start by the beginning: Why do we sit? Because we get tired.

What does tired specifically mean? That gravity charges our body (weight) and after a while of resisting it, we need to rest. The specific relief that the body requires though, is not for the legs but for the back. We can actually walk for quite a bit, but can hardly stand for a long period of time. What gets really tired in our body is the back. The vertical force of gravity makes our back slouch. That is why in a chair, the back is more important than the seat. In fact, a slightly leaning chair is more comfortable, because it decomposes the vertical gravity force introducing a slight horizontal direction in it, allowing the back to straighten up. Chairless uses the force of gravity and tiredness working over the legs crossed in front of us, to introduce an horizontal force that helps the back not to stoop.

It is obvious that many things have evolved since the beginning of time and that progress has accumulated in our lives in the form of sophisticated needs and desires. But it is also true, that there are a great deal of things and needs (I would call them atavistic), that haven’t changed much since the origins and they can still be satisfied in an extremely simple way:

ABOUT IRREDUCIBILITY

ChairlessWeil am Rhein, Germany. 2010

sitting on the ground and instinctively wrapping our arms around our legs is one of them. Somebody could think that Chairless does nothing different from that, so why even have it?

The truth is, that it works exactly in the opposite direction: When we cross our legs and put our arms around them, we make our back work as a bow drawn in the extremes between the shoulders and the tail bone. That is why we cannot stay sitting like that for long periods of time. Chairless, instead, introduces a force right in the center of the bow of our spine, pushing it back to a straight position. The band uses the problem (of getting tired) as a solution (to sit comfortably). No wonder Indians could stay for hours in that position.

So, on one hand there is a reduction of problem: the seat of a conventional chair has been transferred to the ground; therefore legs have been dismissed. The only thing that is left to take care of is the back of the seat. And out of that, only the forces in play. On the other hand, there is a opening of possibilities: Chairless not only allows the body to hold the position longer, but also leaves hands free (to eat, drink, write, sms a txt or make a call) and makes going out to

a park to have lunch or picnic on a lawn or waiting in an airport or sitting in a concert, more comfortable.

Having reduced the problem to a question of forces more than to a question of form, I see Chairless more as a tool and less as furniture. More than a design, the important thing here is the principle involved. Actually nothing prevents from people doing their own Chairless, using a belt or any piece of fabric. Once the principle is identified, ideas become naturally an open source. Chairless happens to be just the industrial version of the principle made visible by the Ayoreo band. It uses materials that Vitra already needs for other furniture like the yarn for the reinforcements of sofas or the rejected leather of other objects. We added an elastic band to easily fold it in a bag or a pocket. We also got rid of some material in the only part that is not needed (the spanning in between the knees). Besides liberating some space for doing other things with the hands, it makes evident the forces in play: the tension of a band, which allows the muscles to relax.

When I thought that a chair couldn’t be less than this… I saw this…


We were asked to design the facilities for a high-end winery. The client said he did not want to use architecture for creating a buzz to promote the wine. He just wanted architecture to be instrumental to the company’s aim to produce premium wines; not more than that but also not less than that.

Premium wines express nature at work: grapes register the index of sunlight, the temperature of the air, the humidity of the winds, the acidity of the rocks, the stress of the roots seeking the nutrients of the soil. The quality depends on a combination of chance (the weather of that particular year) and the wine’s design (capacity of the enologist to prepare the vines to capture nature’s operations).

Architecture for a premium winery should consequently be able to guard the delicate balance of nature contained in the grapes throughout the entire process of vinification. Our building wanted only to gently agree and conduct the forces at play, from the smashing of the grapes with the feet, to sedimentation, to fermentation, to bottling, aging and labeling. Tannins have to be kept intact so pumping had to be avoided. We looked for a site where we could take advantage of the slope and use gravity as the only power to move the wine.

After several tests we decided that volumes would constitute the complex. A tower would host the tourist program: sales and wine tasting as well as offices and administration with a grand terrace on top. A box resting on the slope would contain the wine production. Supporting the previous two, a horizontal platform would be the maneuvering courtyard for receiving the grapes of the surrounding vines. We wanted the dryness and the materiality of the volumes to establish continuity with some defensive structures of the neighboring hills as well as the stone quarry adjacent to the site. A certain primitivism in the arrangement tries to tune with the radical directness of winemaking that despite the sophistication of the product, is strikingly atavistic in the way it is produced.

This project was a tipping point in the office’s formal language. We do not care about “style”, be it personal (the author’s signature) or conventional (a preconceived set of rules that works as a kind of demonstrable system of beauty). Even more so, we fight very consciously the notion of style. But it’s a fact that in terms of form making, there was a before and after this project. Before this, we were “designing” a lot: articulating forms, doing this or that move, using quite a lot of lines to say what we had to say. After this project we stopped designing and began to merely “compose” with brainless, charmless pieces. We went from geometries with lots of edges to forms that we wanted to have no more than four sides. Boxes, blocks and monoliths where its value came from the way they relate to each other and not from the design of each of them. The reason for this shift may have been the search for an architecture able to stand the test of time in which we were trying to reduce unnecessary moves and on the other hand, follow forces that are bigger than life. Like shortcuts. Or gravity.

GRAVITY

Winery on the Rhein RiverNierstein, Germany. 2009


On 27 February 2010, Chile was hit by an 8.8º Richter scale earthquake and tsunami. As many as 300,000 housing units were damaged; 500 people died, 100 of them in Constitución. The physical damage was followed by social unrest: people, afraid of not having basic needs satisfied, started looting stores. Police and the military were called to keep the public order. The reconstruction was urgent. But it was also clear that rushing without a plan could compromise the quality of the result.

Given there was no time for the government to start a bidding process, they asked private companies to donate “brains” instead of “bricks”; if private companies could hire consultants to come up with strategies and plans able to channel efficiently the huge amount of money that reconstruction would cost, it would save valuable time.

So forestry company Arauco called Elemental to deliver a Masterplan for how to rebuild Constitución. We were given 100 days to design everything from public buildings to public space, from housing to new transportation routes, from rethinking the energy matrix of the city to strategies for fast economic recovery. And mainly, how to protect the city against future tsunamis, something unheard of in Chilean urban design. We called it PRES Constitución, which stands for Plan de REconstruccion Sustentable (sustainable reconstruction plan).

Such a huge level of potential transformation of the city had to include its citizens. So we started a participatory design process in order to inform the form of the designs. Participatory design is not a hippie, romantic, let’s-all-dream-together-about-the-future-of-the-city kind of thing. It is actually not even asking a community what they think is the right answer to their problem. It is mainly trying to identify with precision what is the right question. There is nothing worse than answering well the wrong question. And the question here was how to protect the city against future tsunamis. There were some alternatives floating in the air.

The first one: Forbid installation on ground zero.

30 million dollars spent mainly in land expropriation.Second alternative: build a big wall, heavy infrastructure to resist the energy of the waves. Big building companies conveniently lobbied this alternative, because it meant 42 million dollars in contracts, and was also politically preferred, because it required no land expropriation.

But given we opted for a participatory process, we asked the people: What else is bothering you? What other problems do you have and you want us to take care of now that the city will have to be rethought from scratch? And what they said was: Look, it’s fine to protect the city against future tsunamis, we really appreciate that, but the next one is going to come in, what, 20 years? But every single year, we have problems of flooding due to rain. In addition, we are in the middle of the forest region of the country, and our public space sucks. It’s poor and it’s scarce. And the origin of the city, our identity, is not really connected to the buildings that fell, it is connected to the river, but the river cannot be accessed publicly, because its shores are privately owned.

So we thought that we had to produce a third alternative: Against geographical threats, provide geographical answers. What if, between the city and the sea, we have a forest? A forest that doesn’t try to resist the energy of nature but dissipates it by introducing friction. A forest that may be able to prevent the flooding, that may pay the historical debt of public space and that may provide, finally, democratic access to the river.

The alternative was validated politically and socially, but there was still the problem of the cost: 48 million dollars. So we did a survey in the public investment system, and found out that there were three ministries with three projects in the exact same place, not knowing of the existence of the other projects. The sum of them: 52 million dollars. So design’s power of synthesis is trying to make a more efficient use of the scarcest resource in cities, which is not money but coordination. By doing so, we were able to save four million dollars, and that is why the forest is today under construction.

THE CITY, THE OCEAN AND THE FOREST

PRES: Post-Tsunami Sustainable Reconstruction PlanConstitución, Chile. 2010

Book Information

Based in Santiago, Chile, Elemental epitomises a new generation of pioneering, socially engaged architects. Led by Pritzker Prize-winner Alejandro Aravena, Elemental specializes in innovative, powerful and humane public-interest projects, working on both large and small scales across Chile, the United States, Mexico, Switzerland, and China. This book beautifully displays Elemental’s unique working methods and philosophy: each project – from iconicstructures like the Siamese Towers to elegant low-cost housing – is accompanied by Aravena’s engaging texts, bringing to life his understanding of civil society and the built environment.

The most comprehensive monograph on one of the twenty-first century’s most visionary and imaginative architects, Alejandro Aravena-Aravena was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2016 for his commitment to a more socially engaged architecture-This book will be published to coincide with a major retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen in 2018-Features stunning images by renowned architectural photographers together with sketches and drawings from Aravena’s personal notebooks-Aravena is recognised as one of the architects leading a new generation towards a more responsible approach to architecture

About the author

Chilean-based Alejandro Aravena established his own practice in 1994. From 2000 until 2005, he taught at Harvard University, where he founded Elemental with Andrés Iacobelli. In 2010 he was granted membership as an International Fellow of RIBA. He curated the 2016 Venice Biennale, and in the same year received the Pritzker Prize.

Specifications

Binding: HardbackFormat: 320 x 240 mm (12 5/8 x 9 1/2 inches)Extent: 256 ppNumber of images: 300Word count: 30,000ISBN: 978 0 7148 7803 4

Phaidon Press LimitedRegent’s WharfAll Saints StreetLondon N1 9PA

Phaidon Press Inc. 65 Bleecker Street, 8th FloorNew York, NY 10012

© 2018 Phaidon Press Limited

phaidon.com

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-31--30- 3rd period from 2010 to 2017elemental

The reason why this project made it to this book (despite not having won the competition) is because it introduced a new dimension in our projects: to gravity and weight as compositional principles (like in the winery in Germany) it added monumentality (something that proved to be necessary in the Art Mill project in Qatar a few years later).

Longer than the Tate, higher than MoMA and purer than the Guggenheim was the way we envisioned to deliver simultaneously a neutral frame to exhibit art, yet a unique architectural experience. Given that the NCCA had no collection to show (and needed to compete with other institutions), we thought that original, site-specific work created by invited artists for such unique halls may attract public and global attention given its one-of-a-kind condition.

When presenting to the Jury in a discussion opened to the public in Moscow, one very high-ranked politician asked, “How was the project going to solve the problem of having people waiting in line to go up to the highest exhibition hall in the world?” We replied, “Well… if you happened to have that problem, it would be a sign that the project was a success. Let’s hope to have that problem.” A slight laugh emerged from the audience. In that very moment we understood there was no chance for us to win the competition.

LONGER, HIGHER, PURER

Competition for the National Centre of Contemporary ArtsMoscow, Russia. 2013

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Arsenale main hall

before starting to design go and study how the masters

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