Alejandro Aravena is a chilean architect, recently awarded with the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale (‘Promising Young Architect’) and selected as a one of the 20 most promising young architects by Icon Magazine, magazine which also features him on the cover of the january 2009 issue.

This outstanding architect has a very strong line of buildings: the Siamese Towers (Chile),  Pirihueico House (Chile), the Mathematics School at UC (Chile) and ongoing projects such as ORDOS 100 (Inner Mongolia, China), the new facilities of St. Edward’s University in (Austin, TX, USA) and a new building for the Vitra Campus (Germany).

Furthermore he is the Executive Director of Elemental Chile, a do-tank that ‘contributes to improve the quality of life in Chilean cities, providing state of the art architecture and engineering, understanding the city as an unlimited resource to build social equity’. This do-tank has made a huge impact in public policies, improving the quality of social housing not only in several cities in Chile, but also in Mexico.

‘There is no point in discussing social housing in architectural terms,’ says Alejandro Aravena, activist-architect behind this collaborative team of architects, transport engineers, builders and social workers that has been rethinking low-income mass housing since 2000.

‘It’s a social and political problem, but we can use design to address these issues,’ says Aravena. Elemental’s projects work within tight policy restrictions and with few resources. The idea is to provide a set of conditions that allow the building units to be adapted and increase in value over time, redefining social housing as an investment not an expense.

‘I have the luxury of operating, and being trained, in the third world,’ says Aravena. ‘I can afford to be primitive enough.’ This sense of the primitive, of boiling a design down to its most relevant and irreducible essence, runs through the work of his private practice, including several widely acclaimed buildings for Santiago’s Universidad Católica. These works attempt to ‘move backwards rather than forwards’, reflecting the basic values of informal education.

Aravena, who has held visiting professorships at Harvard and the AA and is widely published, is currently applying his disciplined approach to a children’s education centre for Vitra, to sit snugly between Zaha Hadid and Alvaro Siza in Weil-am-Rhein. ‘I’m trying to be cutting edge. It’s more like what architects are expected to do.’

More information and pictures: www.iconeye.com and www.archidaily.com