Alejandro Aravena is a Chilean architect known for his humanitarian approach to design. He founded the firm Elemental to tackle issues like poverty and slums through community-engaged design. Some of his notable projects include low-cost housing in Chile that are "half-built" for residents to complete, a concrete-carved innovation center building in Santiago, and lookout points in Mexico designed for pilgrims. Aravena's work focuses on practical and sustainable solutions through participatory processes.

1. Alejandro Aravena
2016 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.

2. Alejandro Aravena
Aravena 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.”

7. 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

8. Design Philosophy

10. 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.”

11. Sculptor House, Santiago, Chile

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. UC Innovation Center

17. 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.

18. 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."

19. 30 housing unit 66 housing unit

20. Quinta Monroy Housing project

22. Interior Ground floor
Interior Top floor

23. 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

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

27. 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.

28. Siamese Towers
3 problem
1. the computers
=now that we work on screens, a good space is the one
that has achieved a
good 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
the
if seen from the front, the building was a unique bi-
chepalus
volume, but seen as a foreshortened figure, the color
difference could show a
couple of really vertical figures, that happened to share
great part of their
bodies, as if they were Siamese creatures.

29. 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.

31. 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

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. 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

37. 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.”

38. Jury Citation
The 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.