Alejandro Aravena Interview: To Design is to Prefer

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] having been trained in a context with scarcity of means which instead of doing something which you that you regret in them you know this thing it's like that because I didn't have the resources and you kind of ask excuse yourself for what you're doing I've always seen scarcity as a filter against arbitrariness the less possible moves not out of a kind of aesthetical approach to minimalism but because you want things to last and if you shake something and chilly we do have earthquakes that are not important very important force not

just because it has to resist or recently not vertically gravity it's a minor force compared to a risotto movement but shaking physically shaking and building everything that was not strictly necessary false so why wait to the earthquake and we submit design to a mental force that has taken out everything that is not strictly necessary there's superfluous it's out hence the name of our practice and I'm internal it's it's when you have synthesized something to its innermost core when you can't keep on taking things out that that moment of irreducible existence may be the only way

to stand the test of time so thus Casa T of means are a great filter to temper design and have taken out of it everything that was not the case [Music] I've been asked this question many times and I still have no idea because I worked out of school let's see 17 what can you possibly know about what you want in life at 17 I had no idea so it it came out of the nose you don't pay attention in the sense that I went to a person at school they were saying look at your

grades and says okay mathematics physics fine drawing and okay so maybe architecture that kind of I have no clue actually in Chile too when you make the National exam to be able to apply to universities you're required to provide the list of careers with which with your points then you apply so I wrote market architecture in the Catholic University number to dance number three fluid I didn't dance I didn't play the flute just to I had no other alternative so I didn't go into architecture I had no plan B but I didn't know what it

was nobody in my family was an architect I think I so full from somebody cans and I thought well this is cool do blueprints it looks nice it was as as shallow and stupid as that which then which then allowed me once in the school to discover a world is a wow that's architecture I didn't have a clue that it could be that and then I remember and this explains a bit not knowing not being fascinated in advance but discovering there was a huge world in this and of course I decided in Chile that is

not a country that has a very strong heritage in architecture we are not Peru that has an empire or Mexico actually to look at great architecture you would take a backpack and and go to Peru and say good stuff not the case in Chile so I studied architecture look at that pictures so that's why I thought it was a mixture of feeling the need but also being guided by the right professors saying look it this is like having been on a hunger strike yeah and now you you're going to go to Europe to a banquet

so be careful I mean unless you take sip by sip this body of knowledge it may be too tough so that's why bring a sketchbook and a measuring tape draw and measure buildings if you just stay with the experience it is so strong that you made the hit it too hard and won't be able to recover so I knew I had to swallow that body of knowledge I was in a hurry somehow because I felt I was back and was late but while doing that I discovered it was a serious and fascinating stuff and then

by drawing you understood the world of architecture you took it into it came from the hand to the head what happened when you did all the drawings in the studies in the measuring well somehow designing is preferring I mean you have the bank page in front how do you make the jump into the void into that blank page square or round rectangle how high how wide which material how where the punctures in do in the every single decision is an infinite chain of decisions that you're exposed to all the time and every path is a

risk of making the wrong choice so you move ahead with one choice eventually found that then go back and prove the another one it's an endless change of decisions and of preferring and there's people that prefer better than others this is what we call the Masters so by drawing and measuring I thought that you could kind of go back in that infinite changes of decisions you somehow walk on their own footsteps I mean are they far away are they dip it was it was when we're looking along the sand you can guess more or less

what kind of person walked those footsteps how high it was how heavy it was so in measuring and drawing it was something like that they're going backwards in the infinite chain of decisions and make sure it's so important in the end you know the decision of how wide the distance between columns going to the temples in Sicily and what you with the naked eye looked at and thought it was the most regular repetitive perfect possible construction ever then you measure anything and understand that there's no one single measure equivalent to the other one two point

nineteen centimeters in the center in between columns two point four fifteen centimeters of difference between the center and the edge when you look at it again having drawn and measured it it's obvious but you don't perceive it before you have measured so how many of its decisions are hidden within the threshold of perception of of the eye the Lorenzana stare it every single angle hidden and disguised in perspective you measure the thing understand everything is skewed actually there's one step less from the science than going from the center how on earth in one of the

most repetitive elements in architecture can you take away one step well that would have appeared if you were not there measuring drawing and and counting actually so going back to the most basic facts wasn't my complement of Education of what I didn't guard in Chile and and I guess this allowed me to at least in my beer complete stupid thought but it worked for me that I was kind of resonating with the decision-making process that has to face the blank page and and it gave me some confidence I guess many architects have studied this classical

heritage you can say and some architects then think of architecture as an art form you know what the starchitect er pieces and when looking at Europe practice it becomes clear that architecture is a part of society being shaped by society and shaping society where does this understanding come from I am so after endemic we're going to London and there's this RIBA word the transgenics a word for combining theory and practice and and of course it's an honor but at the same time it's a challenge because I work in a do tank not in a think

tank I myself think I'm is that we're very practical and of course I needed all the swallowing of those sophisticated cultural knowledge or let's say architecture with the capital a and actually the in the delivery of the speech and on Monday in London the the third thing will be from architecture with the capital a to architecture when with the normal a and backwards with no frills so it's not just you learn from the high-end cultural object which is necessary I mean sometimes the question requires to do that but not always sometimes the problems when you're

always trying to do the cultural object when is not the case yet the tools and the knowledge and the operations that are involved in producing not the monument but would surround the monument are exactly the same one so our our I will wait to comment reality is not by sending a newspaper to later to the newspaper editor or or having public discussions our way to comment reality is by doing projects that's our our way to engage in a source conversation that made matters to society that's our our our advantage that's our power but in order

to do that we need to understand what matters to society we just then enter the conversation through a very specific knowledge which is to give form to the places where the society that same society plates so in principle is that we learn from architecture with the capital a and because are the same tools we then apply it if it's the case not always we all we are sometimes required to do monuments as well so we take from the high-end architecture to the everyday life architecture because as tools are the same thing but when you even

go further to social housing where you're not given a millimeter of freedom to operate then it go but it goes back to the the first thing that you were asking about the forces at play scarcity as a filter against the arbitrariness because the risk is that when you have scarce resources you are required to respond with an abundance of meaning the less the resources the move meaning every single thing that you were given has to have the opposite is right it's true as well an abundance of resources may risk to have a scarcity of meaning

so you would like to make sure just because you were given a lot of resources that you don't answer to just whatever you like you may lost yourself and in social housing and working in scarce environments you remind it all the time that respond to what's irreducible element I'll again it's something that in social housing is not a choice you are forced to to that but if you're working in a high-end project it's something desirable to do take out the superfluous to stand the test of time so from going from the capital architecture with a

capital A to Architecture with a normal a when you go back to architecture with a capital A you came with the filter no frills I mean if it's not strictly necessary out it's a choice it's not longer a constraint but that's that's the the cross-pollination of why we simultaneously keep doing buildings housing and city it's we're exchanging strategies from one field to the other to keep your operation with some integrity you know otherwise you may lose dimensions and and we are we are carefully balancing all the three aspects at least [Music] human relationships matter to

have created in the office and environment where you're challenged at the same time feel that is in the end you spent more time in the office that anywhere else and it's a it's a delicate balance between feeling comfortable to be really hard but not taking it personal at the same time take care of of the environment I was having a conversation the other day with my smaller daughter that she was having some issues at school with with friends she said she became 10 the day before yesterday you know she is now my friend and used

to know not to be so that that tends of being more friends less friends she looked at me that way and didn't like the look but then we're friends again and I don't say look find Rita life is like that you will counter in your life many times people that you don't necessarily lie to you but you have to be able to get along with them I mean look take a look at the office and I said turn around and we were in the office we have lunch everybody at the same table every day okay

you know what maybe the office is not a good example because we have spent a lot of time in not having that kind of person that you have to bear we will not meet that I mean where is mu practice every single person that is in the office there's a chemistry the first in the first place of course they're all talented they are skilled and they're great professionals but we wouldn't have a person that despite the brilliance pollutes and contaminates the chemistry of the group and and then at the end is quality of life so

in that sense the environment in the office is extremely important because it has a consequence on the quality of design I mean being a small practice we need to move fast we take complex challenges so unless you have created an environment where you can treat quickly and and and be posed and saying you you swallow information take the risk and spit it right away in the form of a proposal and take a look at it this is really right if you don't have the confidence to yourself or others like no forget about it unless you

understand there's a shared care that environment wouldn't exist and that's another force we we've created the protected place where we had where we can be hard it is in the benefit of the quality of the of everything that crosses the door of the office and goes into the world and I think that's an another important force at play when one last one to mention and I would call it the war on the cliche it's so easy to think that you already know what you what you've been asked actually it the trend the immediate tendency of

the body would be a person comes with a question and before the person finishes the questions you think you already know the answer I think s their efficiency and saving energy is in the in our DNA we need to fight that and and take our time to understand the uniqueness of the question and until we've swallowed a lot of information we don't want to want to early of course not eternally in terms of diagnosis I mean until you have swallowed the information then right away you spit organize that information in a proposal key so not

too soon not too late but you need to be mentally and intellectually and professionally free to look with naked eyes again and again and again to what you've been asked that's why we start our projects with X well question mark we don't know how this project is going to look like we don't want to know eventually as a consequence it's similar to another one because the question was equivalent but not in advance and so resisting the convention and the cliche I think we'd not prejudice anybody and one of the questions in there and the press

conference what about working for a bank or working for a non democratic democratic country well we ourselves have had the experience in Chile of going through and dictatorship and against that we can make only minor contributions to common good to people's empowerment to fight with our language with our tools which is design those conditions but mainly is to understand is it but particularly the bank thing I showed in the book the something that appeared in the very last minute we're doing this project for the inter-american Development Bank not them nor us know that this was

end up being a bridge between the richest and the poorest neighborhood in Buenos Aires if we didn't allowed ourselves to look at the problem with naked eyes we would have never thought that a possible outcome was a bridge connecting them and for being able to have that freedom we have to be free ourselves we always enter a project and this is an important force going back to a personal belief not needing the project we want the project but we don't need it the small size of the office it's important so that you know what the

conclusion of this is that you don't need a building if that's the conclusion fine it would be a pity we won't have that in our portfolio but for the question it's not needed and if the conditions do not produce something that will create benefit I mean we're in this life we're given a certain amount of heartbeats we try to spend those heartbeats instincts that we think matter are relevant that are challenging so just to do something for the sake of doing it it's it's not doesn't interest and that's that's another another filter egg let's say

and it's a very important force in the freedom the word freedom is a force for us let's stay with a bank because I think it's a beautiful project and illustrate the process because what happens when you kind of take all the stakeholders into account both from kind of the bank but those are the people doing the food the neighbors the security persons what is happening in this process well first of all I guess that we enter the project with the blank page so we spend time designing the question before jumping into the answer in this

particular case the initial not question I would say brief was that the bank wanted to do the headquarters in the slum that's already a very bold move it's an unusual decision from the president of the bank saying that okay we're Bank but we're a Development Bank so unless with our own building do the equivalent of what we do with the loans we get to governments to improve people's quality of life then what kind of Bank are we so there was a legitimate question can we do the headquarters in the slum because by doing that we

will may trigger a change in the situation and produce some benefit beyond our own benefit so we entered the the proposal that's already a very fascinating challenge so it it qualifies as a project where you would like to spend your heart beats the thing is that after a while after understanding that this connection of this neighborhood even though you can look 200 meters away from the richest neighborhood in Buenos Aires there's no access so we would have required from the city so many extra things you know what about the pedestrian axes if the seat okay

we do that but we need a pedestrian access car access I mean the bank operates as meetings with representatives with ministers what about security and the conditions were so many that our recommendation to the bank will look despite your good intentions in here this is going to be a white elephant and it would be not only a bad thing for you but also for the neighborhood that receives this thing that produces no benefits also for other institutions that may be with the good intention of improving the general quality of life and common good by looking

at the bank said you know this is what happens when you try to do unconventional stuff so we better made sure that a success was is not guaranteed at least lightly so our recommendation to the bank was not accept the site that we're being given and and do it somewhere else but after living that it was on one night one of the partners one silo we were on the taxi and we had to make the presentation the next day and in principle the recommendation was to quit with when meant for us to lose the project

as well and I said I said but what if instead of asking for a pedestrian bridge that the bank itself is the pedestrian bridge it not only solved all the problems of the bank having one leg in each neighborhood in terms of security instead of access in terms of infrastructure needed for working as an institution it didn't require from the city all those things that need to be pre done in order to even start the construction it to be taking care with the budget of the bank itself so that you could improve and something that

the city actually was not able to do and this is was one of the biggest challenges in here because you were crossing railroads the city owned the land where the slam is we're talking about fifty thousand people living there but didn't have property on top of the railways that belong to the nation so in order to build the bridge there was it needed a change in the law we would have never ever thought that when you begin you know following that threat it would have led you to before even starting in design to vote a

law in the Congress to be able to produce this benefit so I guess that that project somehow represents that the type of challenges that we have nowadays in cities are much more complex and much more sophisticated I mean we generated the built environment where there were huge deficits and the operations was by sectors somebody was doing housing somebody infrastructure somebody in public space nowadays all the problems that we have cut across all these sectors and these compartments and I guess that the challenge nowadays or discusses resource is not back money but coordination and an architecture

has in its very innermost core a very powerful tool which is the project is synthetic it can't by nature coordinate things that otherwise may be dispersed and I guess that this project has even for us has represented as in a very specific operation something that comes from all of web learn in housing in infrastructure in public space all want together in one single building and it it's moving ahead it's the engineer that calculated SBP that accolade that the piece here are the same engineers are calculating the bridge so we're putting together an incredible amount of

knowledge of different fields in that single project it's a it's a very huge challenge for us how does it feel if you not only ask the right question but then you find the right answer when you kind of and it ends up in good architecture well that's very relative because it might be great architecture for us if for the general public and we have had this very often all our success or our Optimum's are relative if you don't understand what would have that been without facing the problem this way it's hard to understand where is

the improvement if you take a look at social housing it's like and this is supposed to be good if you if you look with the eye of what is expected from design it may not be beautiful I mean it may not look cool but given those constraints $7,000 per family with which to buy land infrastructure and build a house split into three so into the end you have two thousand dollars to do the house well you can't do something that is great it's great compared eventually to what would have been not to do anything at

all so I guess that all the projects that we do have relative optimum and if you don't understand the constraints it's very much open to critic and for the design value the bridge just looking at the bridge it might be yeah there are much better bridges in the world yeah could be but we know what it took to go there and and we know that and for us that's that's enough to make our best effort and so the general reception of the thing we understood already that is not necessarily world will be agreed but that

this is the thing the only thing that we have now is our reputation and we put our professional reputation in the bucket of the project we're risking it to fail all the time I mean the chances to fail in social housing in the context that we are working it's very high and yet we want to go there because it it matters it makes sense we have projects with problems you know where you're building so much to the limit you know the building company wants to say the name if one nail x thousands of units makes

eventually the profit but that risk the roof to blow away with the wind which has happened and yet if asked we would go again into the same kind of challenges of course it hurts and we are not tough skin we have soft skin that's why we worked so hard we even though we choose to go into risky projects we want to make sure that we make no mistakes that's why we don't have so many projects and we work so hard in advance to anticipate eventual conflicts but our choice is to go into those fields where

where the challenge is it's it's hard and the success is not guaranteed and in any case is not an absolute success you may have people liking it and a lot of people not liking it from the from the critic point of view we we are very much interested in the user satisfaction with the thing and and that matters that opinion matters to us but again when you think out loud together with the user because to build the question we need the person it's them telling us what they really need the they're rather clear in what

would have been if we didn't approach the project that way so but that opinion matters to us the rest it's like life like everybody it happens to everybody some people like what you do some people don't [Music] [Music] we talked about the elements of nature we could see the power of nature and opposite you put the power of architecture and one thing I recognized this is that you're not trying to hide the weight of buildings which is very interesting but that's a philosophy as well isn't it well yeah the word philosophy understand it in how

it's used but it it would mean that we're we have a kind of or a plan or a method it's an attitude more than a philosophy I would say and the attitude is about finding or or trying to arrive with design to architectural facts those facts there are things that happen anyhow you may recognize them or or or neglect them but they happen anyhow so the effort is in being able to to identify how many facts are there and then if I choose not to use them it's a conscious decision not something that I never

even thought or realized that was there gravity being one of them and and again it goes back to the question how that we create a common experience from the sketchbook with reality the the shared experience is the one of the shared language what is the common language between the designer and the society in the end it starts from a very basic thing like gravity I mean we're all affected by gravity the building like the Innovation Center for example that it it has all the mouse mass on the outside for very good reasons practical reasons but

also aesthetical reasons and I will double click on that eventually it weights 17,000 tons if we would have done a building of with a glass facade in columns so that it looks light it would have weighed 17,000 tons we've made the exercise in assessment country again gravity it's an irrelevant force it's a cystic condition what matters over there so if you're given 17,000 some thousand tons of matter I mean it's such a huge amount of existence available there but instead of hiding Li or I don't know pretending that the real achievement is to make that

thing float well we thought it's just the contrary it's a metallic force you'd look at then actually this building you don't look at you perceive it with your shoulders it's very hard to communicate through pictures if you and we knew this from the beginning the challenge here was going to will be to communicate with photographs or videos it's not the way to perceive architect this particular one it's with their shoulders you fill those tunnels operating in space but it's a way I guess to find that when you go back to things that you understand intuitively

we call it unspeakable certainties you're with somebody you look at something and they say and the other one you can't explain why you agree but you agree gravity being one of them some italic basic situations being another one a shortcut for example a shortcut you can't avoid and so many times in in buildings you know you create the path from here to there and if the shortcut was was there people we cut across the grass not where the pavement is there's a picture in one of the books I wrote very early on the architecture it's

got actually architectural facts it's this meandering sidewalk in Rio de Janeiro designed by Borla Marx you know and then there's the stubborn short cut you know going straight from A to B these are the kind of forces that you better agree with and it's better to understand and identify what are those forces and actually in the exhibition here laying on the ground looking upwards it's not sitting on the ground I mean you can sit and when you put your back on the ground and look up with your face it's a couple of centimeters difference but

a complete different world how many of those situations were laying on the ground looking at the tree upwards in this case at the video upwards you just agree on the situation well life does have many of those moments of unspeakable certainties and shared agreements beyond cultures so we're constantly and regularly trying to build projects around those moments of consensus you don't know why but you agree and yeah so it reduces your operation so - very few and it's not that there's not just one but not that many how can we bring design to the moment

of irreducibility where we all agree and and that's our our work and and how we work that that's in which we work very hard to try to to be the creative core of each proposal your architecture very often relates to nature you already talked about the forces earthquakes floods Sue's and tsunamis mm-hmm how would you define architecture in nature are they opposites is architecture kind of a human nature how do you think those nature and architecture play together I think it respect to nature has never been about mimicking nature it's by understanding what are the

forces at play again then if we agree on on what we're building what are what are the ground on which we're sitting of course the tools nature uses are very different from the one we use as human beings I do not have the capacity up well maybe some people have I don't so to make it a building grow but even that would be to take one of dimensions since as human beings the question of character the question of emotions are part of the equation of course in the forces that play there the very concrete tangible

ones but yet gravity law the environment I mean if you make a building in this environment with this amount of cold per year with this amount of wind per year has nothing to do like to building in the desert to understand where you have to put the thermal mass going back to the question of the building it was about gravity but this is a let's say an aesthetical or a question of character but mass where it's more efficient for an earthquake is on the edges if you have a tube the the fibers that are close

to the core work very little the fibers that really work are on the edges so have them resistant mass on the edges is a good thing for an earthquake but in addition to that in the Destin environment like Santiago when you have the Sun hitting the walls of your building you want to avoid direct sun radiation on a glass the amount of green house effect that is created by direct variation it's huge our our problem and in terms of sustainability is not about avoiding energy losses like here it's about avoiding undesired energy gains I have

to keep the Sun out you here have to bring the Sun inside this is a complete different attitude yet if you understand that language of nature your operations radically change but beyond that there's a question of character so we're we're a cultured species so we're things and mood of things it's very hard to in to make it instrumental and this goes to what I mentioned before there's pickable certainties what is the character of the building the moment that I transform it into a kind of method it's lost I mean I it's the kind of things

that you know before you know them and I just that belongs to our nature of species which doesn't belong to bacteria so again we with nature trying to understand constraints forces trends but I understand that as human beings we have this it's a necessary condition but it's not sufficient it requires more we have more dimensions and so as a consequence of that the forms that come out of that building of the question it's very unlikely like looks that nature we got to have a purse we had to respond to different forces that are as relevant

as the natural forces the cultural forces involved are the emotional forces involved yet we would like to produce a building that agrees with nature it may not look like nature but it agrees with it talking about points of departure you're coming from Chile right now we're sitting here in Denmark in northern Europe you're going to London you're working globally mmm but does the point of departure which for me naturally is the northern hemisphere for you naturally it's the southern hemisphere you play a role how you conceive the world I don't know I couldn't tell since

I haven't been raised differently so what I do know though is that we make a very conscious exercise not to take anything for granted and and actually the going back to the question of the size of the studio and and not being able to work in all the projects that we're asked which we understand is a huge privilege and we are very conscious of that privilege and how to choose we choose according to the amount of ignorant the more ignorant about the project the more reasons to go into it and when you are ignorant if

you use it rigorously you make those stupid questions than when entering charged fields you may not ask actually one of the biggest difficulties for us is to be ignorant again in fields where we are supposed to be experts by housing so when we are asked to do a social housing project again we do as if we do not know about that so being rigorous with your own ignorance allows you to make those stupid questions and in charge fields may expand even if in one millimeter that field of knowledge and I guess that because in the

southern hemisphere you are required to give a lot of reasons why you are doing this this way and not that way you don't take for granted you're not entitled I mean not because you have studied then you're supposed to be given work no not our case I mean you're being given work because you're able to produce solutions that fulfill needs and desires it's not just it not just my sires if that's something that is in our DNA and is not in the northern hemisphere DNA can tell but I do know that that's the way we

operate and that allows us in principle to go everywhere because if you are entering a problem being the outsider it wanting even to be an outsider in your own country then you are able to focus on what's new innovation is not for the sake of innovation it's the consequence of not having enough knowledge so what that's why we we want to we make the very conscious effort understanding why there's a need to create new knowledge to a project if that project can't be solved with already existing knowledge it's maybe more more efficient that somebody else

does it there's people better than us in doing like that we we think we may contribute when were on the steep part of the learning curve to even to ourselves so being an absolute outsider which would be a way I guess to define our our approach or attitude more than philosophy in architecture you [Music]