Someone I admire in my field

Today I will talk about Alejandro Aravena, a Chilean architect from Santiago, that I admire, and I think is very relevant in the actuality architecture.

He was born in 1967 in a middle class family. He studied in the German College, where he studied with a scholarship, because his parents worked there. He graduated from high school with 17 years old, and he started his university studies in architecture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Aravena graduated as an architect in 1992 and he traveled to Venice to make a postgraduate at the University Institute of Architecture and to follow engraving courses at the Academy Of Fine Arts.

Since 1994, he has practiced his profession independently. Since that same year he has been a professor at the School of Architecture at the Catholic University of Chile and since 2000 he has also been a guest teacher at Harvard. In 2001 he founded ELEMENTAL S.A and since 2006 is his executive director. Aravena direct from this firm an international initiative to innovate and build very low-cost housing. The most novel approach of his work in the public area is the idea of ​​social housing with the possibility of growing, "expandable" housing. By this initiative, in 2016, he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize (the most prestigious recognition to architects). His concept of "incrementabilidad" constitutes a real change of paradigm in the way of projecting housings for the poorest sectors. The central idea of Aravena is to define the housing (also the social one) as an investment and not as a social expense.

Aravena possesses a special style of exercising the architecture, which has turned it into a symbol of the commitment with the social architecture, and for this I like and I admire him.