Alejandro Aravena Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Alejandro Aravena (born 1967) is a Chilean architect and the executive director of Elemental, a practice in Santiago that works on housing, public space and infrastructure. Elemental’s “half a good house” approach, in which families receive the structure and services of a home and extend it themselves, has been applied in Chile and Mexico, and Aravena also designs university and corporate buildings in concrete. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2016 and directed that year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.

Santiago and Venice

Aravena was born in Santiago in 1967 and graduated from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in 1992. He studied history and theory in Venice and set up his own office in Santiago in 1994. He taught at Harvard from 2000 to 2005.

Elemental and incremental housing

In 2001 he founded Elemental with Andrés Iacobelli. Its first project, Quinta Monroy in Iquique (2004), housed 100 families on the site they already occupied: Elemental built half of each house, with kitchen, bathroom and structure, and left the rest for residents to build over time. The approach was used again after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in Constitución, and the practice later released some of its housing designs open source.

Buildings and the Pritzker

Aravena’s other works include the Siamese Towers (2005) and the Anacleto Angelini Innovation Center (2014) at the Catholic University in Santiago and the Novartis office building in Shanghai. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2016 and directed the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, Reporting from the Front, the same year.