CHAPTER 2
ELEMENTAL Elemental was founded by Alejandro Aravena and Andres Iacobelli in 2000, who the met at Harvard University, when they questioned why social housing is so bad in Chile, when Chilean architecture was starting to get world recognition. They highlighted four conditions on how to create a real impact:
a)
“Anything developed for social housing must be proven on a scale of the complex and not with just
one unit.” b)
“Projects presented on paper are futile. To confront the scepticism normally directed towards
academic works, we had to build” (Aravena, A. Iacobelli, A. 2016: 30) c)
Working with the constraints of current market rules.
d)
“Had to survey and formulate the right question (not invent it, instead of asking ourselves what
would constitute a quality social housing project” (Aravena, A. Iacobelli, A. 2016: 30).
Elemental are considered widely to be the “starchitects of the poor” (Trevino, L. 2016). Their accolade in the Pritzker Prize Laureate in 2016 was given world-wide media coverage in the architectural world, with glittering articles from many world leading newspapers and magazines. Aravena’s curation of the Venice Biennale 2016 titled, “reporting on the front line,” has popularised social housing amongst architects becoming the poster boy of the movement. Thus, these “two events and Aravena’s global fame are for us an excuse to ask a simple question: is it possible to produce more social justice in the entrenched neoliberal present?” (Boano, C. and Vergara Perucich, F. 2016: 60). The half happy architecture report by Camillo Boano and Francisco Vergara Perucich (2016) critiques Quinta Monroy and the 2016 Venice Biennale in a different light to what the media has presented us with. “We were puzzled by the use of the word social architect. Fig. 5 Portrait of Alejandro Aravena. Lopez, S. (n.d)
After that then, we followed the opening speech of the 2016 Venice Biennale where the rhetoric of the social turn has been 23
