VIDEO: Alejandro Aravena-Advice to the Young

Be as nerdy and as unrestricted as possible, says Chilean Pritzker Prize-winning architect Alejandro Aravena – of the visionary architecture studio Elemental – in this short video. Watch him offer his advice to young architects, who should always be open-minded and willing to take risks.

Listen without prejudice and swallow all the information you get from others, Aravena advises, and when you “spit out” this information in a project proposal, avoid clichés and dare to be rebellious – be an author rather than a consultant. In this way, he continues, “some good may be put out in the world in the form of the built environment.”

Alejandro Aravena (b. 1967) is a Chilean architect. In 2001 he founded the socially conscious architectural office Elemental, which focuses on projects of public interest such as housing, public space, infrastructure and transportation, and they first gained recognition for their work with social housing projects in Chile. Elemental also design other kinds of buildings from museums through universities to office buildings, not only in Chile but also in the U.S., Mexico, China and Switzerland. Exhibitions of their work have been included at e.g. the Sao Paulo Biennale 2007 and MoMA in New York City (2010). Aravena is the recipient of prestigious awards including the Silver Lion (2008), the Erich Schelling Architecture Medal (2006), a Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (2008) and the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2016. From 2009 to 2015 he was a member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury, and in 2016, he was the director and curator of the Architecture Section of the Venice Biennale.

 

 

Alejandro Aravena was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in October 2018. Camera: Klaus Elmer, Edited by: Klaus Elmer, Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner, © Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2019, Supported by Dreyers Fond