1.- WINNER OF THE PRITZKER 2016
Pritzker
prize-winning architect Alejandro Aravena designs proyects that solves human
problems. Everyone ask for selfies with him. They all say the same thing.
“Thank you” as if the Pritzker prize, architecture’s Nobel, which Aravena had
just won, had been awarded on behalf of everybody in Chile.“We’re a small
country. We hardly ever win anything.”
The prize clearly acknowledges a sea
change in architecture, which not everyone agrees with. “Aravena,” sniffed
Rowan Moore, critic for The Guardian,“has some of the trappings of the
starchitect: a high media profile, a globe-trotting, lecture-giving lifestyle,
a carefully cultivated look, a bizarre hairstyle".
THE FAMILY
Aravena
is the son of middle-class teachers who scrimped to provide him with a private
education in Santiago. Aravena and his wife took me one sunny afternoon to see
the rusted steel and glass house they built for themselves and their two young
daughters. (Aravena has a teenage son from a previous relationship.) It’s perched
atop a little hill on a leafy street in Santiago. The house is near
Elemental’s.
Chile
happens to be producing some of the world’s most gifted architects right now, a
generation that includes Cecilia Puga, Sebastian Irarrazaval, Pezo von
Ellrichshausen, Mathias Klotz, Teresa Moller, Smiljan Radic and Aravena. On top
of the prize, Aravena is directing the current Venice Architecture Biennale,
whose socially minded show he has titled “Reporting From the Front.” Relative
to other Pritzker winners he hasn’t built a lot; and some of his signature
projects, including Constitución, are still in medias res, so it’s not entirely
clear how they will actually turn out. Moreover, he and his partners at
Elemental are concentrated on social housing.
2.- CLIMATIC CHANGE
The
EARTHQUAKE and tsunami of Chile in 2010.
It produced more than 500 people died. Residents were left without homes,
electricity and clean water. The architect Alejandro Aravena was surveying the
damage days later. His firm, Elemental, and a team of consultants had been
enlisted to put together a reconstruction plan. “We knew from the start that
the people had to participate in the reconstruction process".
SEA WALL
After the tsunami, construction companies floated the idea of erecting an
immense protective sea wall, which would have made a kind of fortress, or
prison, of the ravaged riverfront. It’s a proposal politicians love: A wall is
an impressive-looking thing. But residents, in public meetings, had bigger
concerns. Tsunamis were rare. The city flooded regularly, they complained.
There was next to no green space, inadequate housing, little access to the
river, poor roads and miserable public buildings.
Elemental’s
strategy required as much diplomacy as it did design. The firm compiled public
demands. Then Aravena presented residents with a choice: Build the wall and
rebuild the houses destroyed along the river, or get nearly everything else
they asked for, for millions less. Relocate displaced families and make the
waterfront into a public forest, Elemental proposed. New trees wouldn’t stop
another once-in-a-generation tsunami but would mitigate its impact and
meanwhile open up the river as parkland. Retention ponds would deter flooding
and double as recreation sites. The people of Constitución voted for the
forest.
Aravena
says, “the sea wall would have provoked riots because it would not have done
what people wanted. The participatory process revealed public priorities, of
which the tsunami turned out to be last.”
3.-INCREMENTAL HOUSING
CREATING THE CONCEPT
Incremental
housing, it’s called: a response to scarcity. Elemental’s first incremental housing
project was in Iquique, in northern Chile, in 2003. The government puts up
money for a new home, but not enough to cover the cost of land, construction
and a place much bigger than a studio apartment. So Elemental provides “half a
good house.” Residents get what they couldn’t easily build or pay for on their
own: a two-story, two-bedroom home, with roof, kitchen and bathroom — plus an
equivalent empty space next to it. Residents complete the second half, if, when
and as they can.
This
was hardly a new idea, or unique to Aravena. During the 1970s, a policy called
“sites and services” envisioned plots of land with plumbing and electrical
connections, requiring tenants to build houses from scratch. Aravena talks
about monotony creating “the cadence of a silent rhythm.” The syncopation of
half-houses and voids acts like a grid, a framework, binding the community
together, insuring visual continuity, encouraging variety.
"I’m not sure that a private house is especially interesting as architecture, in that it’s either the client’s vision or the architect’s. A school or public housing project operates in a more complex space where everything becomes negotiable, which I think is more creative, more difficult, more challenging for an architect and more rewarding.”
4.-LOOKING THE PAST
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PRITZKER
A
few blocks in the other direction is Aravena’s old architecture school at the
Universidad Católica de Santiago.The school in the 1980s, “it was a competitive
but collaborative atmosphere,” Aravena told me. These were the Pinochet years,
so many foreign magazines were banned and Chilean architecture students had
limited access to what was going on in the rest of the world. “We were saved
from postmodernism,” Aravena says about the upside of censorship. “By default,
we were left to find our own identity.
Aravena
and his classmates graduated into post-dictatorship Chile, "We were
educated. We were steeped in art, math, literature and materials. We knew how
to draw and to build.”
Aravena
carried a sketchbook. He draws all the time, to work out a plan, to illustrate
a point. His conversation tends not toward architecture and aesthetics but
toward practical affairs — negotiations, economics, materials, numbers — which
for him can be a source of wonderment.
“I
feel I really began to study architecture when I moved to Venice in 1992,” he
told me. “I was on a completely different planet there. I could go to a
building for a week just to draw it. I spent a month drawing Doric temples in
Sicily. I was measuring everything, absorbing all this history we didn’t learn
in Chile. I saw Romanesque buildings and Palladio’s buildings and Alberti’s and
Brunelleschi’s buildings, all of which finally made me realize what
architecture could aspire to be.
Aravena
picked up from Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier. The next year, Aravena was hired by
Harvard to teach in its architecture school; and the math building led to
another university commission, the Siamese Tower, probably Elemental’s most
frequently photographed building.
This is essentially the strategy Elemental employs with incremental housing: a quotient of chance contained within a binding geometry, the outcome made by many hands. Clearly, Aravena sees himself as the man in the middle. His clients are often big Chilean mining and forestry companies that run company towns. After more than a dozen years doing incremental projects, Elemental has become the firm of choice for emergency and social housing in Chile
5. THE MATH BUILDING ON THE UNIVERSITY’S SAN JOAQUIN
CAMPUS:
The
glass facade, like a nesting doll, is just a shell enclosing a separate
building with the classrooms, the gap in between acting as a virtual chimney,
extracting heat. The building feels claustrophobic and half-baked, uncomfortable
in its own skin. In a sense, it provided a model for what not to do with his
next campus project, the neo-Brutalist and impressive Angelini Innovation
Center.
What
resulted weighs in at 17,000 tons. The building is, in essence, about exactly
what you see: load-bearing walls, gravity and concrete, organized abstractly to
resemble Jenga blocks. “So much architecture these days is devised via computer
modeling that doesn’t express weight but gives you planes in space,” Aravena
adds.
Inside,
everything is reversed: glass, steel and wood, light and linear, finely
detailed, with a soaring atrium. The concrete frame saves energy.
The
building is, in essence, about exactly what you see: load-bearing walls,
gravity and concrete, organized abstractly to resemble Jenga blocks. “So much
architecture these days is devised via computer modeling that doesn’t express
weight but gives you planes in space,” Aravena adds. “Designs end up being
about taste and finishes. I hear that Frank Gehry sometimes asks for a meter of
distance in his buildings to separate structure from exterior, muscle from
skin. The Innovation Center is all structure, all muscle.”
