Raymundo Contreras Ramírez: octubre 2016

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.”