King of the block: Alejandro Aravena, master of minimalist forms, wins architecture’s Pritzker Prize

When Alejandro Aravena began studying architecture at Santiago’s prestigious Catholic University in the 1980s, the strongman Augusto Pinochet was still clinging to power.

“It was the last period of Pinochet’s dictatorship,” Aravena said. “Information was controlled. Not that many things made their way to Chile.”

Combined with the geography that has always kept Chile physically isolated, wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, that political climate was enough to make Aravena and his classmates feel as though the rest of the architecture world was a million miles away.

Three decades later, the 48-year-old Aravena finds himself at the very centre of the profession. On Wednesday he was named winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize, the top honour in architecture.

Aravena has built an international reputation largely on the basis of a practice that combines strong, photogenic and increasingly stripped-down form-making with a dedication to humanitarian work. In addition to his own office, Alejandro Aravena Architects, he has been a co-director since 2000 of Elemental, a firm that focuses on affordable housing and public-space design.

Elemental’s low-rise residential complexes are often produced in cooperation with residents themselves, featuring units that are — by design — half finished, allowing their owners to expand them incrementally over time. After an earthquake and tsunami hit Chile in 2010, the firm produced a reconstruction plan for the coastal city of Constitucion.

“What really sets Aravena apart is his commitment to social housing,” said the citation from the jury, which this year included architects Richard Rogers, Yung Ho Chang and Benedetta Tagliabue, and US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.