Pritzker Prize 2016: Alejandro Aravena

The most impressive of this last type is the massive Innovation Centre at Santiago’s Catholic University. It is a sculptural volume of cast concrete which modulates the internal environment using natural ventilation. But its real significance lies in its appearance, its play of solid and void and its function as a symbol, an architectural signpost.

Aravena has a charming manner and a slick delivery as perfectly tailored for TED talks as it is for international gatherings of wealthy philanthropists. He speaks of economics and inequality but he carefully skirts around the mire of politics and redistribution.

His rise has been meteoric: last year he was appointed as the curator of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, with the Pritzker the twin pole of global architectural credibility. But what is most interesting about him is his belief that architecture can be used to accelerate social change.

“If you start with an idea of architecture as art,” he says, “then buildings may be beautiful — but they risk irrelevance. The challenge is to look at the problems the whole of society is facing: poverty, segregation, violence, insecurity, education, inequality. Sometimes these issues have an industry attached to them — education or health, for instance — but where they do not, that is where architecture can come in.

“The power in architecture,” he continues, getting into what sounds like a well-practised speech, “is in synthesis.”

Isn’t the Pritzker Prize more usually associated with blockbuster cultural projects of architects such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel? “Sometimes,” he replies, “iconic architecture does have a role. It can give form to forces that are in the air. But the big issues require non-spectacular answers.”

When I ask why he thinks Latin American architecture is so good at the moment (in my opinion, far outstripping anything happening in the global north), he says something intriguing — something you rarely hear admitted by architects.

“Scarcity is a great filter against arbitrariness. Sometimes more resources can lead to a scarcity of meaning.”

I ask him to expand.

“The less you have,” he says, “the more you have to explain why you’re doing something. You can now build anything if you have enough money. The question then is ‘So what?’ The best architecture is somewhere between art and survival.”

Where some might see potential disaster in the current explosion of urban populations, Aravena sees hope. “There are 1bn people living below the poverty line in cities. There will be 1bn more. But the city can be a shortcut to equality.

“The challenge for society is that although income increases, so does inequality. How can you address that without redistribution?”

Architecture, he suggests, along with urbanism, is one way. “Public infrastructure, public space, housing, there are infinite opportunities and they are extremely efficient ways of spending public money. Urbanisation,” he declares, “is good news.”

An example of what he’s talking about can be seen in Elemental’s plan for Constitución, the Chilean city which was flattened by a tsunami in 2010. The residents were keen to move back to the sites of their old dwellings, despite the risk. Elemental proposed a forested zone between the sea and the city which would provide protection from the waves and absorption of waters. Combined with striking but simple architectural interventions to remake the public infrastructure of the city — schools, community halls, a theatre and so on — the plan was to make the city’s communal space a source of renewed civic identity. The generosity of the vision and its focus on expansive green public space could provide a paradigm for other damaged city centres from Christchurch to Haiti.

Aravena’s victory reflects, in arguably the best possible way, a degree of guilt about architecture’s elitism. Good-looking, globe-trotting, talented and with a social conscience, Aravena is the architectural establishment’s counter to accusations of detachment from everyday challenges of poverty and inequality, and to the charge that architects are merely fiddling with edges of the world’s greatest problems. His work and his words inspire architects to think about the problems of housing, society, the poor and, perhaps more importantly than anything, to engage with communities and not just each other.

Aravena owes his Pritzker to his offer of hope to a profession fearful of its own lack of engagement. The award is a vaccination against accusations of irrelevance. How could anyone argue with that?