Alejandro Aravena: My architectural philosophy? Bring the community into the process

If there is any power in design, it is the power of synthesis, the more complex the problem, the greater the need for simplicity, so let me share three cases where we try to apply power synthesis designs. Let's start with the global challenge of urbanization. It is a fact that people are moving towards cities and even if it is contradictory, it is good news, the evidence shows that people are better off in cities, but there is a problem that I would call the threat of the 3, the speed of The scale and scarcity of means with which we will have to respond to this phenomenon is unprecedented in history so that you have an idea of ​​the 3 billion people who live in cities today, 1 billion will be under the line of Poverty By 2030, of the 5 billion people who will live in cities, two billion will be below the poverty line.

That means we will have to build a city of one million people per week with ten thousand dollars per family for the next few years. 15 years a city of 1 million people a week with ten thousand dollars per family if we don't solve this equation It's not that people will stop coming to the cities, they will come anyway, but they will live in favelas and informal settlements, so what Do well. An answer may come from the favelas and slums themselves. A clue could be in this question we were asked 10 years ago. They asked us to house 100 families who had been illegally occupying half an actor in the center of the city of Ikike in the north of Chile using a subsidy of 10,000 with which we had to buy the land, give them the infrastructure and build the houses that in The best case would be about 40 square meters and by the way they say that the land because it is in the center of the city is three times more than what social housing can normally afford due to the difficulty of the issue that have.

We decided to include families in the

process

of understanding the limitations and began a participatory design

process

and tested what was available on the market. Independent houses. 30 families could be accommodated. Row houses. 60 families. The only way to accommodate them all was through construction. high and they threatened us to go on a hunger strike if we even dared to offer this as a solution because they couldn't make the small apartments expand, so the conclusion with the families and this is important, not our conclusion with the families It was that we had a problem, we had to innovate, so what would you do?

A middle-class family lives reasonably well in about 80 square meters, but when there is no money, what the market does is reduce the size of the house to 40 square meters. What we said? And if instead of thinking of 40 square meters as a small house, why don't we consider it half of a good house? When you reframe the problem as half of a good house rather than a small one, the key question is which half do we have? do and we thought what we had to do with public money that they have that families will not be able to do individually we identified five design conditions that belong to the hard half of the house and we went back to the families to do two things together and divided tasks, our design It was something between a building and a house, as a building it could pay for expensive and well-located land and as a house it could expand if in the process of not being expelled to the periphery while getting a house for the families. their network and their jobs we knew that the expansion would begin immediately, so we went from this initial social housing to a middle class unit we achieved five families in a couple of weeks this was our first iniki project 10 years ago this is the last project in chile different designs same principle you provide a framework and from then on the families take control, so the purpose of the design, to try to understand and try to give a response to the three threats, scale, speed and scarcity, is to channel the very construction capacity of the people we win.

We won't solve the million people a week equation unless we use people's own energy to build, so with the right design slums and favelas may not be the problem, but actually the only possible solution. . The second case is how design can contribute to sustainability in 2012. entered the competition for the angelini innovation center and the objective was to build the appropriate environment for the creation of knowledge, it is accepted that for this objective the interaction of creation of Knowledge between people, face-to-face contact is important and we agreed on that, but for us the question of the right environment was a very literal question: we wanted to have a workspace with the right light, the right temperature and the right air. , so we asked ourselves if the typical office building helps us in that sense, what does that building normally look like?

It is a collection of floors one on top of the other with a core in the center with elevators, stairs, pipes, cables everything and then a glass skin on the outside that due to direct solar radiation creates a huge greenhouse effect inside, in addition The guy who works on the seventh floor walks by the third floor every day, but he has no idea what the guy on that floor is working on, so we thought, maybe we have to turn it around. this skin and what we did was have an open atrium. a sacred core, the same collection of floors, but it has the walls and the mass on the perimeter so that when the sun hits it does not hit directly on a glass but on a wall, when you have an open atrium inside you can see what others They are doing. from inside the building and you have a better way to control the light and when you place the mass and walls on the perimeter then you avoid direct solar radiation.

You can also open those windows and get cross ventilation. We just made those openings of such a scale that they could function as raised squares of outdoor spaces for the entire height of the building none of this is rocket science it doesn't require sophisticated programming it's not about technology this is just archaic primitive common sense and by using the common sense we went from 120 kilowatts per square meter per year, which is the typical energy consumption to cool a glass tower, to 40 kilowatts per square meter per year, so with the right design sustainability is nothing more than rigorous use of common sense.

The last case I would like to share is how it is designed. They can provide more comprehensive responses against natural disasters. Maybe they know that in 2010 Chile was hit by an 8.8 scale earthquake and tsunami and they called us to work on the reconstruction of the constitution in the southern part of the country, they gave us 100 days three months. to design almost everything, from public buildings to public spaces, uh, street greed, transportation, housing and mainly how to protect the city against future tsunamis, this was new in Chilean urban design and a couple of alternatives were in the air , first a 4-bit installation.

At ground zero, 30 million dollars were spent mainly on land expropriation, this is exactly what is being discussed in Japan today and if you have a disciplined population like the Japanese this can work, but we know that in Chile these lands go to be squatted anyway, so this alternative was unrealistic and undesirable. The second alternative built large walls and heavy infrastructure to resist wave energy. This alternative was conveniently pressured by large construction companies because it meant 42 million dollars in contracts and was also the politically preferred one because it did not require land exploitation, but Japan demonstrated it. that trying to resist the force of nature is useless so this alternative was irresponsible since in the housing process we had to include the

community

in the path to find a solution to this and we began a participatory design process here abroad no I know if you were able to read the subtitles but you can see from the body language that participatory design is not a romantic hippie, let's all dream together about the future of the city, something like that is, in reality, it's not even with the families trying to find it.

The correct answer is mainly to try to identify precisely what the correct question is. There's nothing worse than getting the wrong question right, so it was pretty obvious after this process that we either chicken out and leave because it's too tense or we leave. Even further by asking what else is bothering you, what other problems do you have and do you want us to take care of ourselves now that the city will have to be thought out from scratch and what they said was to look good to protect the city against future tsunamis, we really appreciate that. but the next one will arrive in 20 years but every year we have flooding problems due to the rain.

We are also in the middle of the forest region of the country and our public space sucks in its poor people and their cars. The origin of the city, our identity It is not really connected to the buildings that fell, it is connected to the river, but the river is not publicly accessible because its banks are privately owned, so we thought we had to produce a third alternative and our approach. was against geographical threats we have geographical answers what if between the city and the sea we had a forest a forest that does not try to resist the energy of nature but dissipates it by introducing friction a forest that may be capable of laminating water and avoid flooding that can pay for the historical depth of the public space and can finally provide democratic access to the river, so as a conclusion of the participatory design the alternative was politically and socially validated but there was still the problem of the cost of 48 million dollars so what What we did was a survey on the public investment system and we discovered that we are three ministries with three projects in exactly the same place without knowing of the existence of the other projects, the sum of them 52 million dollars, so the scientific power of The synthesis is to try to make more efficient use of the most scarce resource in cities, which is not money but coordination, by doing so we were able to save four million dollars and that is why the forest today is under construction, even if it is the force of self-construction the force of common sense or the force of nature all these forces need to be translated into form and what that form is modeling and giving form is not bricks of cement or wood, it is life itself, designs, the power of synthesis is only an attempt to make the innermost core of architecture, the force of life, available to everyone, thank you very much