Alejandro Aravena, 2016 Pritzker Prize | #ADInterviews

There are challenges, forces at play in the world, and that makes sense to take care of it, as a citizen, as a normal citizen, we live in places and we see that, on the one hand, there is the potential for us to have a good development of life as a society or as a community. and we also witness threats and frictions and uh in cities uh uh or in the built environment more generally uh and architecture has the power to translate into form all those forces if, if there is any power in architecture, that is the power of synthesis, the more complex the topic, the greater the need for synthesis and I suppose one possible motivation would be that ability, and even that surprises me that the forces that push and pull in opposite directions can be channeled uh into one direction through design um we describe Elemental as an action tank, which means we use the city as a shortcut to equality by identifying projects in the city from public space to transportation, from infrastructure to housing uh with which we can improve the quality of life of people uh and trying to equalize public goods or make public goods through architecture, if we want to have a say, if we have an idea of ​​something that could be improved, we try to make a project, that it's what we know, we try to do it if if the client doesn't exist, we try to create the client, we try to identify funds, uh, and address the problems that we think are relevant through proposals, we try to organize reality in a proposal key, no just an endless diagnosis, we are not consultants, we are me.

I suppose the very core of the architecture is to organize the information into a proposition key, of course we need to talk a lot, especially with communities, to try to identify where the people are, what is the question rather than what is the answer, what is the answer? what are the problems that we should respond to uh, we don't expect people to have the answers just to correctly identify what they expect what they are looking for what are the problems that matter I guess that's one of the biggest challenges is to show that architecture is a added value and not an extra cost if the design is seen as this ability to synthesize complexity, as a form of efficiency, because you are doing many more things at once than linear discourse is capable of doing. to reach a single direction, then the efficiency achieved is an added value.

I would say that another challenge is to be able to start from as far as possible from architecture, in them it seems that any citizen can and feels that he can have. I say, then, the problems that architects face do not belong to architecture. Every person can be interested, concerned or affected by insecurity, pollution, congestion, segregation, whatever. I mean, there are so many problems in the built environment. that um those should be the starting points for an architect, so from that point of view we have an opportunity and we are living in times in which in principle we could improve the quality of life or the scale of most people like never before. and the speed of that process will require us to develop new knowledge, but cities themselves can be the vehicle to improve that quality of life by working as this shortcut to quality, we just need to be creative enough to strategically identify opportunities in cities and translate them. that in the proposals I was particularly interested in challenging and questioning and introducing reasonable doubt into the bad part of that intellectual approach whether all the jargon that was being used in the Academy um made any sense when talking to people on the street.

I just wanted to test if words like space, which for people is the goal of astronauts, I mean, made any sense when talking about your monthly salary and walking on a street that is unsafe. Do these two Kingdoms coincide with this? I guess it's been a In a way, what we've been trying to develop all these years, even at Elemental, is not just a purely humanitarian approach, not at all, we've never claimed any kind of moral superiority here, if anything, we just We think that We are good designers and we try to use our skills on issues that matter, we believe that the challenges around cities are relevant, they are difficult and we want to be part of that challenge, so if you believe in something, you must be brave enough to so that if The decisions you make don't follow the pain, well, do it and I guess we need more of those types of people who are open to following their own measures of success, their own beliefs, uh, and I guess that's at the center.

Sustainability is not a technical scientific question, we know what to do, we just need to be able to follow that path constantly and courageously.