Cristobal Palma
Alejandro Aravena is the winner of the "Nobel Prize" of architecture, the Pritzker Prize. Here are some of his greatest designs...
ELEMENTAL
The office building in the Novartis Campus Shanghai seeks to provide spaces that encourage knowledge creation. The office spaces are designed to accommodate the different modes of work -- individual, collective, formal and informal -- and foster interaction between the users. Around a forest of Metasequoias, the ground floor accommodates the Fitness and Be Healthy Center which are part of the campus public level where users from the different buildings meet. The outside of the building responds to the local climate with a solid facade of reclaimed brick facing south, east and west. On the north facade, the building is open to let indirect light get inside the open office spaces.
+2 Architectes
This suspended cabin had to balance comfort and compactness. We opted for a linear volume so that we could place it with freedom within the existing column grid but also as a way to counterbalance the reduction of the living area; the length of the cabin compensates and decompresses the compactness allowing the writers to transit through different situations: cooking, eating, and sharing. Structurally the cabin is just a very efficient and simple slab that supports both the living space on top of it and the hanging system of the existing canopy. We introduced a pivot and a lateral force to stabilize the system, but also as the way to provide access to the cabin and allow all the services to reach the ground.
Nina Vidic
Innovation and knowledge creation requires on the one hand, to increase the encounters among people, so openness is a desired attribute for its architecture; on the other hand, developments and inventions have to be protected, so security and ability to close and segregate are appreciated architectural conditions as well. We proposed a rather opaque construction towards the outside, which is also efficient for the Santiago weather and then have a very permeable architecture inside. Having the structure and the shafts on the perimeter of the building reverts the typical curtain wall building layout and concentrates openings in a very specific points in the form of elevated squares.
Felipe Diaz
Developed in the context of the Post-Tsunami Sustainable Reconstruction Plan of Constitución, Chile, the project consists of a series of coastal lookout points along the way from Maule River's mouth to Maguellines Port, in order to reinforce and highlight the natural heritage embodied by the huge rocks of this landscape. The platforms are connected to a 4.5 km bicycle lane.
ELEMENTAL
Arauco Forest Company asked us to develop a plan to support their employees and contractors so they could have access to home ownership, in the context of Chilean housing policies. This allowed us to work for the first time with the high end of housing policy. Given the greater availability of resources, instead of taking one of our less expensive housing units and delivering it more finished, we applied again the same principle of incremental housing, but with an initial and final growth scenario of a higher standard: these houses begin with an initial area of 57 m2 and can grow up to 85 m2.
Iwan Baan
We were one of several firms asked to re-imagine rest stops along a Mexican pilgrimage route. Building in such 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 pilgrims a resting place with dark shadows, cross-ventilation and two vantage points, one: a view over the path they walked for a hundred kilometers to arrive there, the other, the landscape ahead.
Cristobal Palma
We needed to accommodate 300 beds, some social areas and some services for the whole campus in a narrow lot. We thought of creating a plinth with the more public facilities to activate the ground floor, then the social areas carving the volume's core and finally articulate the perimeter of the building as much as possible, increasing the linear meters of façade in order to guarantee views and natural light to each room. To be able to resist a tough environment we opted for a sequence of skins that are hard and rough in the outer layer and become softer and more delicatewhile moving towards the core.
Cristobal Palma
A four-hectare Children's Park on a hillside, part of a program to celebrate the bicentennial of Chile.
Ramiro Ramirez
In the Mexican housing market, the cheapest solution that is offered is about $30,000 dollars. So the poor are not being reached. We developed an improved version of Iquique, Chile, where houses underneath and duplex apartments on top, have an initial cost of $20,000 dollars, but can achieve a middle income standard of 72 m2 after self built expansions. The efficiency in land use without overcrowding, allowed us to purchase land in a neighborhood where the average cost is $50,000 dollars. We expect the families to benefit from that value gain, and from the fact that cost of land expresses close availability of services and opportunities.
Cristobal Palma
We were asked to do a glass tower. Glass is very inappropriate for Santiago's climate, because it generates greenhouse 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.
Cristobal Palma
The challenge of this project was to accommodate 100 families living in a 30-year old slum, using a subsidy of USD $7,500 that in the best of the cases allowed for 36 m2 of built space in a 5,000 m2 site, the cost of which was three times what social housing could normally afford. The aim was to keep the families' social and economic networks, which they had created close to the center city, instead of evicting the families to the periphery. And we wanted the families to live in houses able to achieve a middle-class standard instead of condemning them to an everlasting social
housing one. None of the solutions in the market solved the equation. So we thought of a typology that, as buildings -- could make a very efficient use of land and as houses — allowed for expansion. We provided the families with the "half a house" that would be difficult for them to build for themselves and we gave them space to "complete the
house" as their means allowed. After a year, property values tripled and yet, all the families have preferred to stay and keep on improving their homes.
Roland Halbe/Roland Halbe, Stuttgart
"We were asked to do all kinds of classrooms, from seminars to auditoriums, in a very dense context. The only way out, was to go high. Given that massive student occupancy in higher floors has always been hard to solve, we decided to bring the courtyard closer to each upper floor. This building is a vertical cloister."
Tadeuz Jalocha
"A mathematician is a machine of transforming coffee into equations." We thought that joke, expressed one of the dimensions by which knowledge is produced: the casual encounter of people. Besides the coffee room, we identified the corridor as a design opportunity, as the moment where you see other people before they disappear into the isolated retreat of the individual working unit. We decided to add the new building to two existing ones, so that after the operation we had fewer elements than at the beginning.

Story highlights

Alejandro Aravena is the winner of the 2016 Pritzker Prize for architecture

Rather than flashy monuments, he is best known for low cost social housing

He believes in building "half a good house" -- and allowing residents to build the rest

CNN  — 

Alejandro Aravena, the socially-conscious Chilean architect famed for building “half a good house,” is the winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize for architecture, the profession’s highest honor.

Tom Pritzker, the chairman of the Hyatt Foundation which awards the prize, called Aravena “an architect who deepens our understanding of what is truly great design.”

Aravena – who, at 48 years old, is among the esteemed prize’s youngest winners – is best known for creating inventive, low-cost social housing. His Santiago-based practice ELEMENTAL has built over 2,500 units of housing since 2000, focusing on under-served urban migrants – including a 2003 project in Iquique, Chile where the firm built housing units which appeared half-built, with the intention that residents extended their living space into the leftover void.

While he has little profile among the public at large in the U.S. or Europe, Aravena is recognised by peers as one of the world’s leading architects, and over the past decade has taken prestigious architecture awards including the Marcus Prize and the Erich Schelling Medal. He sat on the jury for the Pritzker prize for six years before this year’s win.

Ramiro Ramirez
"Half of a good house" financed with public money. The yellow block, filled-in, shows how middle-class standard can be achieved by the residents themselves.

In a statement that compounded the prize’s focus, in recent years, on design that marries artistry with social impact, Pritzker said: “His built work gives economic opportunity to the less privileged, mitigates the effects of natural disasters, reduces energy consumption, and provides welcoming public space.”

For Aravena, speaking over the phone from his practice in Santiago, Chile, the prize is a reward for his practice’s five-partner team, for a consistent approach that has married exploring new fields with a refusal to be intimidated by unfamiliar:

“Everything that we’ve done is an unexplored territory [for us]. Back in 2000, when we started social housing I had no idea what a ‘subsidy’ was, so in a way we’ve been very consistent and rigorous in using our own ignorance as a powerful tool.”

His practice is known for its participatory design approach, where the architects work with the public and the buildings’ end users from the outset: not to “co-design” the building, he says, but to define lines of investigation that free more complex projects from unnecessary complications. He says the approach means asking “stupid questions.”

“If you are a rigorous outsider and pay careful attention to the information then eventually you formulate those stupid questions that allow you to move forward.”

Built on trust

Even before the Prize’s announcement, 2016 was fated as another ground-breaking year for Aravena. He was chosen last July as Director of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale – his first directorial gig – which will see him focus on “several battles that need to be won” in order to improve the quality of our built environment.

It’s typical of Aravena’s approach which he says aims to see “classical” architectural artistry complement “socially oriented” or “problem solving architecture,” that takes on the environmental, economic, and social issues of its time.

Cristobal Palma
ELEMENTAL's Siamese Towers

Priztker jurors singled out for praise the UC Innovation Centre Anacleto Angelini, the sixth educational building which Aravena has designed for his alma matter, Universidad Católica de Chile. A statement with the award declared their admiration for the “maturity” of the concrete building, which is nevertheless flooded with light through a central glass atrium. The shell guarantees energy consumption is minimal, and it has earned broad praise for defining an innovative, contemporary appearance in contrast to the glass-sided buildings that are commonplace in modern cities.

Nina Vidic
UC Innovation Center Anacleto Angelini, Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

But, arguably, he has received greatest recognition internationally after leading ELEMENTAL, the so-called “Do Tank” he founded in 2001 – an unlikely seeming partnership between his team of architects, a Catholic university, and Chile’s largest oil company.

ELEMENTAL has built work in The United States, Mexico, China and Switzerland but retains a close connection to home.

After the 2010 earthquake and tsunami that hit Chile, ELEMENTAL was called to masterplan the reconstruction of the city of Constitución, Chile — a project for which they spearheaded a democratic participatory approach, even while keeping pace with the urgent requirements to rebuild.

Building half a house – as he did again in Constitución – was a decision borne out of necessity, working with only $7,000 subsidy per family to cover costs including land and infrastructure.

But it also gave the residents the economic power to decide their own priorities, and those that could afford to extend increased their property value which could be used as collateral for bank loans to restart devastated businesses.

Felipe Diaz
Constitucion, Chile is being reborn via a radical participatory process, led by ELEMENTAL

“There are things that they know much better than us, and if somebody knows how to make the most efficient use of scarce resources it’s poor families,” says Aravena. “They are masters in establishing priorities, and we wanted to take that wisdom into the system”

Aravena explains: The new role of the architect in 2016

Aravena spelled out the global challenge of urbanization for the architect today in a TED talk a year ago, now viewed over a million times. The migration toward cities amounts to the need for a new one million-person city every week, he says – all for a cost of just $10,000 per family.

I ask if this urgent challenge is what motivates Aravena, and his surprising, optimistic response outlined a novel role for the architect in the years to come:

Alejandro Aravena: “This process of urbanisation – of people migrating towards cities – is great news.

“The more people who come to cities the better, in the sense that cities are extremely powerful tools to improve the quality of life of people.

“If you take every single indicator of development – from child mortality, to access to sanitation, to access to education, to jobs – it is more efficient to deliver that in the form of a public policy if people are concentrated in a space. Actually, if anything, cities are concentrations of opportunity, not accumulation of houses.”

“The problem is that the scale, the speed, and the scarcity of means with which we have to respond to this process of urbanization, has no precedence in human history.

“We need to build a one million person city, per week, with $10,000 per family in order to accommodate this migration towards cities. If we don’t solve this equation… it’s not that people will stop coming to cities, they will come anyhow, but they will live in awful conditions.

“So in order to be able to respond the such a scale and speed of demand of urban migrants, we won’t solve it unless we use people’s own capacity to provide themselves with the built environment.

Cristobal Palma
Bicentennial Children's Park, Santiago, Chile

“That’s why we think the favelas [cramped urban slums constructed ad-hoc by their residents] are not part of the problem but part of the solution. The scarcest resource in the construction of these new urban environments won’t be money, it will be coordination and simplicity.

“So the role of the architect will be creating the right frame[work] so that the forces involved are channeled in the right direction.”