Small Margins Introduction Owen Hatherley Portrait Cristobal Palma
In the last few years Alejandro Aravena, this year’s Pritzker Prize laureate and the director of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, has become a figurehead for a new kind of social architecture. Beginning with the 2004 Quinta Monroy housing project in Iquique, in Aravena's native Chile, his firm Elemental has managed to sidestep dichotomies about low‑income housing – top‑down versus bottom‑up, to use the common clichés – and create a synthesis that quickly became a popular potential solution.
In Quinta Monroy, Elemental – whether because limited by a minuscule budget or through a commitment to the possibilities of informal housing – laid out the shell of the houses, their basic structure and street pattern, and let residents do the rest. The resulting photographs, showing the architect‑designed, raw, grey concrete halves of the houses filled out with the colourful, ad hoc additions built by their inhabitants, have been widely circulated (very wildly circulated if you consider that this is a relatively recent social housing project). From there, Aravena and Elemental went on to create similar schemes in Santa Catarina, Mexico, and the Villa Verde housing in Constitución, again in Chile. What was interesting about these later schemes was that they were relatively middle class, unlike in Iquique, suggesting that Aravena considered the adaptability, incremental design, and room for growth and mutation common in informal self-built slum housing to have applications beyond the swift provision of emergency housing. Although Aravena has built several more normal – namely, fixed and unadaptable – buildings for universities, private homes and the like, the announcement that came with the awarding of the Pritzker Prize to Aravena in January made it clear that the award was being given on the basis of his housing work and all that such projects suggested. That is, that it is still possible to do social architecture in a neoliberal world, and that it could be lighter, more adaptable, more participatory and less bureaucratic than the classic welfare-state architecture of the modernist era; and, most simply of all, that he proved that, in Tom Pritzker’s words, “architecture at its best can improve people's lives”. On the other hand, for critics such as Patrik Schumacher, the senior designer at Zaha Hadid Architects, the award represented “the PC takeover of architecture”, praising designers on the basis of sociology and activism, not on architectural form. I met Aravena in the Italian Cultural Institute in London, where he was working on his curation of the Venice Architecture Biennale. With its theme of Reporting from the Front, Aravena’s biennale is widely expected to present the sort of architecture that Schumacher hates – self-effacing, socially engaged, rough and collaged. Yet however much he may seem like a PC-gone-mad leftwinger to his opponents, I found Aravena to be extremely polite and diplomatic; albeit exceptionally hard to pin down.
Interview