Alejandro Aravena Interview: To Design is to Prefer

Having been trained in a context with a lack of resources, instead of doing something that you regret, you know that this is because you did not have the resources and you sort of apologize for what you are doing. I have always seen scarcity as a filter against arbitrariness, moving as little as possible not because of a kind of aesthetic approach to minimalism but because you want things to last and if you shake something and it's cold we do have earthquakes that are not important, very important. not only because it has to resist or recently not vertically gravity, it is a minor force compared to the movement of a risotto, but to physically shake, shake and build everything that was not strictly necessary false, so why wait for the earthquake and we subject the

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to a mental force that has taken out everything that is not strictly necessary is superfluous is outside there the name of our practice and I am internal is when you have synthesized something to its innermost core when you can't keep taking things out that moment Irreducible existence may be the only way to withstand the test of time, which is why House T Media is a great filter to temper the

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and has eliminated everything that was not so.

I've been asked this question many times and I still don't have an answer. idea because I worked outside of school, let's see 17, what can you know about what you want in life at 17? I had no idea, so it came out of the nose, you don't pay attention in the sense that I went with a person. in school they said, look at your grades and say, okay, math, physics, good drawing, and okay, then maybe architecture, that kind of thing. Actually, in Chile I also have no idea when you take the national exam to be able to apply to the universities you must enter. provides the list of careers with which with your points you then apply so I wrote market architecture at the Catholic University number to dance number three fluent I didn't dance I didn't play the flute just to I had no other alternative so no I didn't dedicate myself to architecture.

I didn't have a plan B, but I didn't know what it was. Nobody in my family was an architect. I think I was so full of someone's cans and I thought, well, this is great, making plans, it looks good, it was like superficial and stupid like that which then allowed me once in school to discover a world is a wonder, that's architecture. I had no idea what that could be and then I remember and this explains a little bit of not knowing, not being fascinated. beforehand, but I discovered that there was a huge world in this and, of course, I decided that Chile is not a country that has a very strong architectural heritage, we are not Peru that has an empire or Mexico, in fact, to look at great architecture , you would take a backpack and go to Peru and say good things, that's not the case in Chile, so I studied architecture, look at those photos, that's why I thought it was a mix of feeling the need but also being guided by the right teachers who said , look, this is it. like having been on a hunger strike, yes, and now you are going to Europe for a banquet, so be careful, I mean, unless you take sip by sip this body of knowledge, it may be too difficult, so bring a sketchbook and a tape measure draw and measure buildings if you stick with the experience, it's so strong that you hit it too hard and you won't be able to recover, so I knew I had to swallow that body of knowledge.

Somehow I was in a hurry. because I felt that I had returned and I was late, but while I was doing it I discovered that it was something serious and fascinating and then, when drawing, you understood the world of architecture in which you took it, it came from the hand to the head, what happened when you did everything. the drawings in the studies in the measuring well in some way to design is to

prefer

I mean that you have the page of the bank in front how do you make the leap into the void towards that blank page square or round rectangle how tall how wide what material how where are they the punctures What you do in each decision is an infinite chain of decisions that you are exposed to all the time and each path carries the risk of making the wrong decision, so you go ahead with one option and finally discover that you then go back and prove the other.

It is an endless change of decisions and

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ences and there are people who prefer something better than others, this is what we call the Masters, so by drawing and measuring I thought that you could go back in those infinite changes of decisions that in some way you walk through your account. steps, I mean, they're very far away, they sink, it was, it was, when we look along the sand, you can roughly guess what kind of person walked those steps, how tall it was, how heavy it was, by measuring it and draw it. something like that they go back in the infinite chain of decisions and make sure that it is so important that in the end you know the decision of how wide the distance is between the columns that go to the temples in Sicily and what you saw with the naked eye and I thought it was the perfect, repetitive and most regular construction ever possible so, you measure something and you understand that there is not a single measurement equivalent to the other two point nineteen centimeters in the center between columns two point four fifteen centimeters of difference between the center and the edge when you look at it again after you have drawn and measured it is obvious but you do not perceive it before you have measured it, so how many of its decisions are hidden within the threshold of perception of the eye, Lorenzana stares at it at every hidden angle. and disguised in perspective you measure the thing you understand that everything is biased in reality there is one less step from science than going from the center how on earth in one of the most repetitive elements of architecture can you remove a step?

Well, that would have appeared if we weren't there measuring, drawing and counting, actually, so getting back to the most basic facts was not my Education complement of what I didn't save in Chile and I guess this allowed me to at least in my beer complete a stupid thought, but It worked for me because it was sort of resonating with the decision making process that you have to face the blank page and it gave me some confidence. I suppose many architects have studied this classical heritage, you can say, and some architects then think of architecture as an art form, you know what the works of the star architects are and, looking at European practice, it is clear that the Architecture is part of society and is being shaped by society and shaping society, where does this understanding come from?

I am so endemic that we are going to London. and there is this RIBA word, GMOs, a word to combine theory and practice and of course it is an honour, but at the same time it is a challenge because I work in a research group, not in an expert group. I myself think it's us. They are very practical and, of course, I needed to absorb all that sophisticated cultural knowledge or, let's say, architecture with a capital letter and, in fact, in the delivery of the speech and on Monday in London the third thing will be architecture with a capital letter. to architecture when with the normal a and the other way around without frills, so it is not only learning from the high-level cultural object that is necessary.

I mean, sometimes the question requires doing that, but not always, sometimes problems arise when you're always trying. make the cultural object when it is not yet the case the tools and the knowledge and the operations that are involved in producing not the monument but would surround the monument are exactly the same so our I will wait to comment on the reality is not by sending a newspaper and then go to the editor of the newspaper or have public discussions our way of commenting on reality is by doing projects that is our way of starting a conversation source that matters to society that is our our advantage that is our power but in order to do it we need to understand what What matters to society?

Only then do we enter the conversation through a very specific knowledge, which is to shape the places where society is located, that same society. So in principle, we learn from architecture with a capital letter and because they are the same. tools that we then apply, if that is the case, not always all of us are sometimes also asked to make monuments, so we go from high-level architecture to the architecture of everyday life because, as tools, they are the same, but when even If we go beyond social housing, where we are not given even a millimeter of freedom to operate, then let's go, but we return to the first thing you asked about the forces at play: scarcity as a filter against arbitrariness, because The risk is that when you have scarce resources, you must respond with an abundance of meaning, the less resources are moved, which means that every thing they gave you has to have the opposite, it is true, also an abundance of resources can run the risk of having a shortage. of meaning, so you would like to make sure that just because you were given a lot of resources you don't respond to whatever you want, you can get lost and in social housing and working in scarce environments, you remember all the time that you respond. to which it is an irreducible element, I repeat, it is something that in social housing is not a choice that you are forced to make, but if you are working on a high-level project, it is something desirable that you must do.

Eliminate the superfluous to stand the test of time, so from going from capital A architecture to normal A architecture, when you go back to capital A architecture, you came with the no-frills filter, I mean, if it's not Strictly necessary, it is a choice, it is no longer a restriction, but that is the cross-pollination of why we continue to make buildings, homes and cities simultaneously. We are exchanging strategies from one field to another to maintain their operation with some integrity. Otherwise you may lose dimensions and us. They are carefully balancing all three aspects, at least human relationships are important to have been created in the office and the environment in which you are challenged, at the same time you feel that in the end you spent more time in the office than anywhere else and it is a delicate balance between being comfortable, being really tough but not taking it personally and at the same time caring for the environment.

The other day I was talking to my youngest daughter about how she was having some problems at school with her friends, she said the day before yesterday she turned 10, you know she's my friend now and before I knew she wasn't, so that tends to be more friends, less friends, she looked at me that way and didn't like the look, but then we became friends again. and I'm not saying look, find Rita, life is like that, many times in your life you will face people that you don't necessarily lie to, but you have to be able to get along with them, I mean, look, take a look at the office and I said let's turn around and we were in the office we all have lunch at the same table every day, okay, you know, maybe the office isn't a good example because we've gone a long time without having that kind of person that you have to put up with. , we won't meet, I mean, where is my practice?

Every person who is in the office has chemistry first of all, first of all, of course, they are all talented, they are skilled and they are great professionals, but we would not have a person who, despite the brilliance, contaminates and contaminates the chemistry of the group and then in the end it is the quality of life so in that sense the environment in the office is extremely important because it has a consequence on the quality of the design. I mean, being a small practice, we have to move fast, we take on complex challenges, so unless you've created an environment where you can quickly deal and be posed and told to swallow information, take the risk and spit it out. immediately in the form of a proposal and take a look at it, this is really correct if you do not have confidence in yourself or others, do not forget, unless you understand that there is a shared concern, that environment would not exist and that is another strength we have. created the protected place where we had where we can be tough is for the benefit of the quality of everything that walks through the office door and out into the world and I think that's another important force at play when one last one to mention and I would call it the war against cliché, it is so easy to think that you already know what you have been asked, in reality the immediate tendency of the body would be that a person comes with a question and before the person finishes the questions you think you already know the answer I believe that its efficiency and energy savings are in our DNA.

We need to fight against that and take our time to understand the uniqueness of the question and until we have swallowed a lot. of information we don't want to want early, of course, not forever in terms of diagnosis, I mean, until you have swallowed the information, you immediately organize that information into a proposition key, so that neither too early nor too late, but it is It is necessary to be free mentally, intellectually and professionally to look with naked eyes again and again at what you have been asked, that is why we start our projects with X, well, question mark, we do not know what this project will look like, since we do not know.

I do not want to know it finally, as a consequence it is similar to another because the question was equivalent but not in advance and, therefore, resisting convention and cliché, I think we would not harmto nobody and one of the questions there and the press conference. What about working for a bank or working for a non-democratic democratic country? Well, we ourselves have had the experience in Chile of going through a dictatorship and against that we can only make minor contributions to the common good and the empowerment of people to fight with our language with our tools, which is to design those conditions, but mainly it is to understand , but particularly about the bank that I showed in the book, something that appeared at the last minute, we are doing this project for Inter-American Development.

Neither they nor we know that this ended up being a bridge between the richest and poorest neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, if we did not allow ourselves to look at the problem with the naked eye we would never have thought that a possible result would be a bridge that connects them and to be able To have that freedom we have to be free ourselves, we always enter into a project and this is an important force that goes back to a personal belief that we don't need the project, we want the project but we don't need it. The small size of the office is important so you know what the conclusion is that you don't need a building.

If that's the conclusion, fine, it would be a shame if we don't have it in our portfolio, but for the question, it's not. It is necessary and if the conditions do not produce something that generates benefits, I mean, we are in this life, we are given a certain number of heartbeats, we try to spend those heartbeats, instincts that we believe matter, are relevant and are challenging, so you just have to do it. something for the simple fact of doing it is not of interest and that is another filter egg, let's say and it is a very important force in freedom the word freedom is a force for us, let's stay with a bank because I think it is a beautiful project and illustrates the process because what happens when you take into account all the interested parties, both the bank type, the people who make the food, the neighbors, the security people, what is happening in this process, well, First of all, I guess.

We entered the project with a blank page, so we spent time laying out the question before jumping to the answer. In this particular case, the initial non-question, I would say briefly, was that the bank wanted to make its headquarters in the poor neighborhood, that is already very bold. move is an unusual decision by the president of the bank saying okay, we are a Bank, but we are a Development Bank, so unless with our own building we do the equivalent of what we do with the loans we give to governments to improve people's quality of life. So what kind of bank are we?

So there was a legitimate question: can we make the headquarters in the poor neighborhood? Because by doing so we can trigger a change in the situation and produce some benefit beyond our own benefit, so we enter the proposal that is. It is already a very fascinating challenge, which is why he qualifies it as a project where you would like to spend your heartbeats, the thing is that after a while of understanding that this connection of this neighborhood, even if you can look 200 meters away from the richest neighborhood in Buenos Aires. Aires there is no access, so we would have required so many additional things from the city, you know, what about the pedestrian axes?

If the seat is okay, we do it, but we need pedestrian access, car access. I mean, the bank operates like meetings with representatives with ministers. about security and the conditions were so many that our recommendation to the bank will be seen despite their good intentions here this is going to be a white elephant and it would not only be something bad for you but also for the neighborhood that receives this. that produces no benefits either for other institutions that may have the good intention of improving the general quality of life and the common good looking at the bank said this is what happens when you try to do unconventional things, so we better make sure that success is not guaranteed at least lightly, so our recommendation to the bank was not to accept the site they are giving us and do it somewhere else, but after experiencing one of the partners in a silo in the one we were. the taxi and we had to make the presentation the next day and in principle the recommendation was that we stop with when it meant that we would lose the project too and I said I said but what if instead of asking for a pedestrian bridge the bank itself is the pedestrian bridge, Not only did it solve all the problems of the bank having a leg in each neighborhood in terms of security instead of access in terms of infrastructure necessary to function as an institution, but it did not require from the city all those things that need to be done. previously to even start construction, you have to take care of the budget of the bank itself so that it can be improved and something that the city was not really able to do and this was one of the biggest challenges here.

Because you were crossing railroads, the city owned the land where the slam is, we are talking about fifty thousand people who lived there but they did not have property above the railroads that belong to the nation, so to build the bridge it was there. We need a change in the law, we would never have thought that when you start you know that following that threat would have taken you before even starting to vote on a law in Congress to be able to produce this benefit, so I guess that project somehow represents that the The type of challenges we have in cities today are much more complex and much more sophisticated.

I mean, we generated the built environment where there were enormous deficits and the operations were by sectors, someone did housing, someone did infrastructure, someone did public work. space today all the problems we have in all these sectors and these compartments and I suppose that the challenge today or when talking about resources is not the return of money but coordination and an architecture has in its innermost core a tool very powerful the project is. Synthetic, by nature it cannot coordinate things that might otherwise be dispersed and I suppose that this project even for us has represented as a very specific operation something that comes from all the web learning in housing in infrastructure in the public space that we all want together . in a single building and if it's moving forward, it's the engineer who calculated the SBP who recognizes that the piece here is the same engineers who are calculating the bridge, so we are bringing together an incredible amount of knowledge from different fields in that one project. a very big challenge for us, how does it feel if you not only ask the right question but then find the right answer when you ask it and it ends up in good architecture?

Well that is very relative because it could be a great architecture for us if it were for the general public and we have had this very often, all our success or our Optimum is relative if you do not understand what it would have been without facing the problem in this way , it is difficult to understand where the improvement is if you take a look at social networks. it's housing and this is supposed to be good if you look with the eye of what is expected of the design, it may not be beautiful, I mean it may not look good, but given those limitations, $7,000 per family to buy land infrastructure and build a house divided into three, so in the end you have two thousand dollars to make the house.

Well, you can't do something that's great, it's great compared to doing nothing at all, so I guess all the projects that we have are relatively optimal and if you don't understand the limitations it's very open to criticism and therefore the value of the bridge design just by looking at the bridge could be yes there are much better bridges in the world yes it could be but we know what it took to get there and we know that and for us that is enough to do our best effort and so the general reception of what we already understood is not necessarily that the world agrees, but that this is what The only thing we have now is our reputation and we put our professional reputation in the project bucket.

We risk failure all the time. I mean that the possibilities of failing in social housing in the context in which we are working are very high. and yet we want to go there because it is important, it makes sense, we have projects with problems, you know where you are building to the limit, you know that the construction company wants to say the name if one nail x thousands of units are eventually obtained. profits, but that risk is that the roof will blow away, which has happened and yet, if we were asked, we would face the same type of challenges again, of course it hurts and we are not thick-skinned, We have soft skin, that's why we work so hard.

Although we choose to get involved in risky projects, we want to make sure we don't make mistakes, which is why we don't have as many projects and work so hard in advance to anticipate possible conflicts, but our choice is to enter those fields. where is the challenge is difficult and success is not guaranteed and in any case it is not an absolute success, it is possible that people like it and many people do not like it from a critical point of view, we are very satisfied. interested in the user's satisfaction with the thing and that matters, that opinion matters to us, but again, when you think out loud together with the user, because to construct the question we need the person to be the one to tell us what they really need.

It's clear what would have been if we hadn't approached the project that way, but that opinion matters to us. The rest is like everyone's life, it happens to everyone. Some people like what you do. To others, right? We talk about the elements. From nature we could see the power of nature and in front you put the power of architecture and one thing that I recognized is that you are not trying to hide the weight of the buildings, which is very interesting, but that is also a philosophy, is it? No? Well, yes, I understand the word philosophy in how it is used, but it would mean that we have some kind of plan or method, it is an attitude more than a philosophy, I would say, and the attitude is about finding or trying.

To get to the architectural facts with design, those facts there are things that happen anyway, you can recognize them or neglect them, but they happen anyway, so the effort is in being able to identify how many facts there are and then if I choose not to. using them is a conscious decision, not something I ever thought about or realized gravity was one of them and again it comes back to the question of how do we create a common experience from the sketchbook with reality, shared experience is The one of the shared languages ​​which is the common language between the designer and society in the end starts from something very basic like gravity.

I mean, we're all affected by gravity. The building like the Innovation Center, for example, has everything. the mouse is heavy on the outside for very good practical but also aesthetic reasons and I will double click on that eventually it weighs 17,000 tons, if we had made a building with a glass façade on columns to make it look light, it would have weighed 17,000 tons. We have done the country assessment exercise again. Gravity is an irrelevant force. It is a cystic condition. What matters there is that if they give you 17,000, a few thousand tons of matter, I mean, it's a huge amount of available existence there, but.

Instead of hiding Li or I don't know how to pretend that the real achievement is to make that thing float well, we think that it is the opposite, it is a metallic force that you would look at, so in reality you don't look at this building, you perceive it. with your shoulders it is very difficult to communicate through images if you and we knew this from the beginning the challenge here was going to be to communicate with photographs or videos is not the way to perceive the architect this one in particular is with his shoulders the fill tunnels that They operate in space, but it is a way, I suppose, of discovering that when you go back to things that you understand intuitively, we call it indescribable certainties, you are with someone, you look at something and it tells you and to the other you cannot explain why. you agree but you agree that gravity is one of them, some basic situations in italics, another being a shortcut, for example, a shortcut that you can't avoid and many times in buildings you know that you create the path from here to there and if the shortcut was There were people we cut across the grass, not where the pavement is?

There's an image in one of the books I wrote very early on architecture, it actually has architectural data, it's this winding sidewalk in Rio de Janeiro designed by Borla Marx, you know, and then there's the stubborn shortcut that you know goes straight from A to B, these are the kinds of forces that it's best to agree with and it's best to understand and identify what those forces are, and in fact, in the exposition here, lying on the ground looking up, he's not sitting up. on the floor, I mean, you can sit down and when you put your back on the floor and look up there's a difference of a couple of centimeters, but it's a completely different world.

How many of those situations were lying on the ground looking up at the tree in this one? In the case of the video above, you are simply agreeing with the situation. Well, life has many of those moments of indescribable certainties and agreements.shared beyond cultures, so we constantly and regularly try to build projects around those moments of consensus, you don't know why, but you agree and yes, then reduce your operation, very few and it's not that there aren't just one but not many. How can we bring design to the moment of irreducibility where we all agree and that is our job and how we work?

That's what we work very hard on to try to be the creative core of each proposal. Your architecture is often related to nature. You already talked about the forces, earthquakes, floods, Sue's and tsunamis. mm-hmm. How would you define architecture in nature? They are opposites. ? esarchitecture as a human nature, how do you think nature and architecture interact? I think respect for nature has never been about imitating nature, but understanding what the forces are at play again and then, if we agree on what we're building, what is the ground we're sitting on? Of course, the tools that nature uses are very different from those we use as human beings.

I don't have the ability to get up well, maybe some people do. I don't have it to turn it into a building. grow, but even that would be taking on a dimension since as human beings the question of character, the question of emotions are part of the equation, of course, in the forces that play there, the very concrete tangible ones, but nevertheless, the law of gravity, the environment, I mean, making a building in this environment with this amount of cold per year with this amount of wind per year has nothing to do with building in the desert to understand where to put the thermal mass, returning to the question of the building.

It was about gravity, but this is, let's say, a question of aesthetics or character, but the mass where it is most efficient for an earthquake is at the edges, if you have a tube, the fibers that are close to the core work very little, the fibers that really The work is on the edges, so having resistant mass on the edges is good for an earthquake, but other than that, in the Destin environment like Santiago, when the sun hits the walls of your building, you want to avoid direct solar radiation. a glass the amount of greenhouse effect that is created by direct variation is enormous our problem and in terms of sustainability it is not about avoiding energy losses as here it is about avoiding unwanted energy gains I have to keep the sun out, here you have to bring the Sun inside, this is a completely different attitude, however, if you understand the language of nature, your operations change radically, but beyond that, there is a question of character, then we are a cultured species, then we are things and the mood of things is very It's difficult to make it instrumental and this goes to what I mentioned before.

There are selectable certainties. What is the character of the building? The moment I transform it into some kind of method, it is lost. I mean, it's the kind of thing you know before. you know them and I simply that belongs to our nature as a species that does not belong to bacteria, so again, with nature, we try to understand the limitations, the forces, the tendencies, but I understand that as human beings we have this, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. requires more, we have more dimensions and, as a consequence of that, the forms that arise from that construction of the question are very unlikely, it seems that nature we have to have a bag, we had to respond to different forces that are as relevant as the natural forces the cultural forces involved are the emotional forces involved but we would like to produce a building that is in accordance with nature it may not look like nature but it is in accordance with it speaking of starting points you come from Chile right now we are sitting here in Denmark, in the north of Europe, you will go to London, you will work globally mmm, but the starting point, which for me, naturally, is the northern hemisphere, for you, naturally, is the southern hemisphere, you play a role in how you conceive the world.

I don't know, I couldn't say it since I wasn't raised any differently, so what I do know is that we do a very conscious exercise to not take anything for granted and, in fact, go back to the question of the size of the studio and not being able to work on all the projects that are asked of us, which we understand is a great privilege and we are very aware of that privilege and how to choose, we choose according to the number of ignorant people, the more ignorant they are about the subject. it projects more reasons to enter it and when you are ignorant if you use it rigorously you ask those stupid questions that when entering loaded fields you may not actually ask one of the biggest difficulties for us is to become ignorant again in fields where we are supposed that we are experts in housing, so when we are asked to do a social housing project again we do it as if we don't know that, so being rigorous with your own ignorance allows you to ask those stupid questions and the fields in charge can expand even if in one millimeter that field of knowledge and I guess because in the southern hemisphere you are required to give a lot of reasons why you are doing this this way and not another way, you don't take it for granted that you don't have the right, I mean. not because you have studied then they are supposed to give you a job no, it is not our case, I mean they give you a job because you are capable of producing solutions that satisfy needs and desires, it is not just that, not only my parents, if that is something . that is in our DNA and it is not in the northern hemisphere.

DNA may say it, but I know that's the way we operate and that allows us in principle to go everywhere because if you're coming into a problem being the outsider, you want to even be an outsider in your own country, then You can focus on what's new. Innovation is not for the simple fact of innovating, it is the consequence of not having enough knowledge. That's why we want to do it. We make a very conscious effort to understand why it is necessary. create new knowledge for a project, if that project cannot be solved with already existing knowledge, maybe it is more efficient for someone else to do it, there are better people than us to do that, we believe that we can contribute when we are on the steep part of the process. the learning curve to equalize ourselves, so being an absolute outsider, which I suppose would be a way of defining our approach or attitude more than philosophy in architecture.