Alejandro Aravena

There are challenges, forces that play out there in the world that makes sense to
take care of as a citizen, as a normal citizen. We do live in places and see that on
the one hand the potential to have a good development of life as a society or as a
community, but also we witness threats and friction in cities or in the built
environment more generally speaking and architecture has the power to translate
into form all those forces. If is there any power in architecture, that s the Palestine
texas. The more complex the issue, the more need for synthesis. Possible
motivation would be that capacity and even that surprise that forces pushing and
pulling in opposite directions can be channeled in one direction through design. We
describe Elemental as a dutank meaning we use the city as a shortcut towards
equality identifying projects in the city from public space to transportation, from
infrastructure to housing with which we can improve peoples quality of life and
trying to match public goods or doing public goods through architecture. If we do
have want to have a say, if we have an idea of something that could be improved,
we try to do a project. Thats what we know. We try to help. If theres not a client,
we try to create the client. We try to identify funds and tackle issues that we think
are relevant through proposals. We try to organize reality into a proposal key, not
just an endless diagnose, were not a consultant with the case of the very core
architecture is to organize information into a proposal key. Of course we need a lot
of talking particularly with communities, you try to identify with people, what is the
question and what is the answer, what are the problems that we should be
responding to. We dont expect from people the answers, to just to identify correctly
what theyre expecting, what theyre looking for, what are the issues that matter. I
guess that one of the biggest challenges is to prove that architecture is an added
value and not an extra cost. If designs seen as this capacity to synthesize
complexity as a way of efficiency because youre doing many more things at a time
than the linear speech is able to a single, in a single direction. Than the efficiency
achieved is an added value. I would say that another challenge is to be able to start
from as far away from architecture as possible on themes that any single citizen can
and feels that can have a say. So the problems that architects deal with do not
belong to architecture. Every single person can is interested or is worried or is
affected by insecurity, pollution, congestion, segregation, there s so many issues in
the built environment that those should be the starting points for an architect.
So from that point of view, we do have an opportunity, were living in a time or
times when in principle we could improve as never before the quality for a majority
of people. The scale and speed of that process will require that we develop new
knowledge, but the cities themselves can be the vehicle to improve the quality of
life working as this shortcut towards quality. We just need to be creative enough to
identify strategically opportunities in the cities and translate that into proposals
I was particularly interested in challenging and questioning and introducing a
reasonable doubt in the bad part of that intellectual approach. All the jardin? That
have been used into academia had not any sense when you talk to people on the
street. I just wanted to if words like space that for the people is astronauts goal,
has any sense that while talking about your monthly salary and walking in a street

that is insecure. Do these two reels? Match? This I guess has been a kind of the
things that we ve been trying to develop all these years. Even a balance that is not
just pure humanitarian approach. Not at all, we ve never ever claimed any kind of
moral superiority here. If anything we just thing we re good designers and we tried
to use our skills to issues that matter. We believe that challenges around cities are
relevant, are difficult and we want to part of that challenge. So if you believe in
something, you should be courageous enough so that your decisions that you take
do not follow the world, then go for that. I guess we need more that kind of people
being open to follow their own meshes of success, their own believes and I guess
that s under very core of sustainability. Is not a technical scientific issues, we know
what to do, we just need to be able to consistently and courageously. Follow that
path.