NSL Colloquium 2013: De-Localize: The Power of Synthesis
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Aravena, Alejandro
Alejandro Aravena is the Executive Director of ELEMENTAL, a socially motivated architectural practice based in Santiago, Chile. His lecture «The Power of Synthesis» will inaugurate the NSL lecture series as an annual presentation of exceptional work under a rotating theme determined by the inviting professor. To begin, Prof. Dr. Marc Angélil from the Institute for Urban Design has organized Mr. Aravena’s lecture to relate back to «De-Localize», the Urban Mutations on the Edge semester topic.
 Nonetheless, I would like to welcome you to the first NSL lecture, the 2013 NSL lecture, the first in a series of annual events supported by the network city and landscape of ETH Zurich and hosted by one of its professors. Every year, another professor will host this NSL lecture, either from the Department of Architecture or the Department of Civil Engineering. Good, I would like to specifically welcome a colleague of mine, Professor Bernd Scholl, former director of the NSL, whose idea it was to launch this annual event on pertinent themes pertaining to the urbanization of the globe. Particularly, I would like to express our gratitude to the NSL colleagues for making the funds available, and we are going to talk about funds today, so I thought it is important to mention that, funds available to invite speakers from remote regions of the world at the front edge of the discipline. So, thank you, Bernd, for your farsighted vision. We decided to invite, as our first speaker in this series, Alejandro Aravena. Thank you for coming. Indeed, coming from very far away, namely Chile, to come to talk to us literally on the other side of the globe here in Zurich, and I heard that you did a detour via Moscow, so the globe is getting smaller as we speak. The reasons to invite him are many faults. First, we were intrigued many years ago by his take on economy in the design of buildings, particularly for those inhabitants without means. Building, for example, only 50% of a house leaving the rest to be completed by its inhabitants over time. Here design encompasses the design of a strategy, of an economic strategy, a contribution to the discipline, specifically considering how naive architects often are when asked to address monetary issues. So, this was the first reason. The second one, he surprised many members of the architecture community when establishing, in addition to his architectural atelier and studio, Elemental, together with others, as a for-profit company. We have many friends that did non-profit companies, but you had the audacity to do a for-profit company, albeit one dedicated to social issues and social housing, a sector normally associated by architects to be certainly non-profit, but not profitable. Third, he had the boldness to seek partners from industries that are generally considered taboo by so-called proper architects that we know so well in this country. In the case of Elemental, a liaison with a prominent Chilean old company, and this to engage in a dialogue on scarcity. So, we thought Alejandro to be brave or dashes outrageous. So, this is the reason why we invited you. So, as expected, he managed to surprise us again when inviting him, clearly making the point that he did not want to talk about money as a resource passé, but on the power of synthesis of form as a scarce resource on the globe and trying to tie this with a subject matter delocalizing or deglocalized that we have set as a theme of this seminar. So, please welcome Alejandro Agavena. Okay, well, thank you so much for the invitation. I think today it will be an excessive presentation. I have an incredible amount of slides. The reason is that the theme of this seminar delocalized being local, global. It's a question we never ask ourselves in our practice. So, I was locked in the room until half an hour ago trying to put together things that we never thought about. And I think it was a good exercise to look from outside at this moment. How are we entering the question raised by the seminar? So, my first thought that trying to understand or even choose or think or define global or local in the way it was phrased in the brief, it could be a tricky question. And instead of having to choose one or the other, maybe the only thing that we are trying to do at least in our practice, so consider this kind of showing as honestly as possible what are we doing on our everyday practice is that having never thought about are we being local, are we being global, what we're trying to do is to be pertinent. And pertinent means to answer first what is the case is the sense of try to understand what is the question that needs to be answered. There's nothing worse than answering well the wrong question. You will see how crucial this was for social housing. So pertinent meaning answering what is the case with what is the case. Once you have framed the problem correctly, I guess, and this is then my proposal, one should be able to synthesize the proper answer for that proper question. Identify carefully what informs the form of a project. And I guess this is the only thing that we are trying to do in the office. Trying to understand what informs the form of a project. This has proved to be a very direct, simple way to communicate with the client, with communities, with governments, with ourselves to verify at the end of the process if what we're trying to do was achieved or not, will have to be redone. So to understand that double approach of being pertinent, answering what is the case with what is the case, the presentation today will have five parts. If we ran out of time and then the drinks seem to be too tempting, we can stop and keep on having a conversation over drinks. So the first thing was being in the debate about global and local, it was an opportunity to look very quickly where have we had projects so far. If there's local or global, where have been working and eventually what have we learned from that? Second, what are we doing today? To understand this is an exercise we never did in the office. You just know you're doing many things but never know how many things you're doing. And actually, truly, this is the first time I look at what we're doing and I have to confess I was a little bit scared. Then I would like to give one example, only one. What do we mean by trying to design the question in identifying what informs the form of a project? Then I would show in detail which I guess is what you're interested in the social housing project of Elemental, where scarcity ended up being a tool for inclusion. This may sound counterintuitive, normally scarcity is associated to exclusion, in this case for us, meant an opportunity for including people. And finally, one example of participatory design at a much bigger level than what we have done on social housing, which is a reconstruction of an entire city after the 2010 earthquake. So this is the menu for the afternoon. So, very quickly, what have we done so far and where? Eventually, just a few comments here about buildings that were the first building we did outside Chile. Knowing that the global local thing is the lens through which I'm going to present this. First building outside Chile in the U.S. in Texas, what was informing the form of the project, the weather, the labor, the available labor, Mexicans, brick masons. And then a very, I guess, true discussion in the end with the client in a board of trustees that have Republicans, have Democrats in Austin, Texas, which is, by the way, the only democratic voting city in Texas. And the debate was about being abstract or nostalgic. So I'm not going to, of course, can't not go into the details, but these were the elements of this soup. And the building was the way we synthesized those issues, trying to make an answer that was the case. So labor, how are we going things to be finally built? So, again, very quickly. Second project outside Chile, not in chronological order, after the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans, not in Brad Pitt's foundation. Project for a bank, competition for a bank in Mexico. Very narrow building for cross ventilation and then some, let's say, architectural themes. Is it one volume or four volumes or both? Then Peregrino project also in Mexico, where the only goal was trying to provide ventilated shaded space with a slope to sit on the ground for people that have worked for 100 kilometers and then able to walk back for that journey. A piece of infrastructure, more than architecture. Also in Mexico, social housing, I'm going to explain this more in detail while explaining Elemental. A project for a resort in Panama. A house near Sao Paulo in Brazil, where we were interested in finally not having earthquakes as a context to design. So how free could structure be, which is not our case in Chile. And also the weather that allows to really question what is indoor and what is outdoor. So that was the entire exploration of this house. Water on the roof to provide thermal mass. Another house in Brazil, at some point with Angelo Bucci, we were developing the scheme for this house. This is the first scheme before Angelo came on board. But again, the themes were already there. Continuity between interior and exterior and taking advantage of the weather. Then this, I guess, was in 2007 when we were called by Vitra to provide a project for that site close to the Sahara-Hadidz fire station. In this case, the client question, specifically Rolf Elbaum. Well, this is what he asked. I would like to do a workshop for children using an old garage that is close to Sahara's building. Please do a direct building, a happy building, flexible so that we can reprogram it, use encouraging materials environmentally efficient with low energy consumption, econotrally footprint, recyclable materials that allow for future expansion with a disciplined floor and cheap. So I guess that once, and this is extremely important, this is after having the experience of framing the problem in such a way, this is what we have been trying to do once again ourselves, without expecting to have such a good client to ask for that. And there were not many things that could actually start from the material point of view that could answer that least. And wood was one sandbricks and reed. And so we decided to go for the reed, which has very specific and restrictive laws for slope. Then another building, a project we did for a winery in Germany. And the main theme here was gravity, both for the building and for the winemaking process was near the Rhine River. A competition where we were shortlisted for the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Chales for Vitra, a house in Inner Mongolia, where the question we thought was about relating to vastness, in this case the Gobi Desert. And so enclosing a territory, which is one of the ways to deal with vastness, and then going up to try to dominate that vastness. A project we were called by CETRA, the Finnish Innovation Fund, to answer the question of how to lower the carbon footprint of Finland by innovating in the built environment. So this is mixed up. So this is a house in Mongolia. And then a project for some real estate development near Geneva. So the projects I just showed regarding the global local debate are placed here. The ones that really got built, only these three. And only if it's built, it counts. Otherwise, it doesn't count. So doing projects here and there unless you build them in general, in architecture, I guess that the only thing that counts are those that are built. So from that thing, our global local debate is around this part of America. So that was about the world. What about in Chile? Very quickly, even faster than the end. First project I did, a private house. Then the mathematics faculty. A school. Montessori school. The medical school of Catholic University. Private house in the southern part of Chile. Architecture faculty in Santiago. Another building for Catholic University. Computer science building. Children's park here and within the metropolitan park. So this is Santiago. So this park on this hillside. And more recently, actually, it was opened a couple of weeks ago. Chile commemorated the 40 years of the military coup in September 11th that happened in 1973. So this is the bombing of the presidential palace and then the Pinochet afterwards for 17 years. And I want to show this not only because it's built, so it counts. But without explaining it too much, this is what I mean by trying to understand what informs the form of the project. Three weeks before September 11th, actually no, five weeks before that we were called by the mayor of Santiago because they were approaching the 40 years and they didn't know what to do. The other things they wanted to do were very likely to be politically questionable because we have presidential elections. These years they wanted to do something that was not mixed or seen as that mayor supporting a specific presidential candidate. So the only thing they knew that it has to be something physical, something concrete. It could have been a festival, it could have been a monument. So during the meeting I was writing down what could possibly inform what we were going to do. So again, not explaining that, but it was trying to create a civilized conversation among people because we thought that was at the very base of the crisis that our country went through in 1973. So talking and being listened, gathering in a balanced way. So we produced these objects to be distributed throughout the city, the entire city, to have conversations in the public space. And then during one day a year, this commemoration with 11 flowers. So there's a quick video on this event which I think would be shown. Sorry, that guy here, he was the chief of press of Allende and he was in the Moneda, in the presidential palace when the bombing happened. And so he survived the bombing and that is his grandson. Thank you So, all these two things is where we have worked outside Chile and within Chile. But what are we doing today regarding again this kind of global local thing? Where I unfortunately I'm not allowed to show images for the Novartis building in the China campus, but it's under construction. We just won a competition for writers' cabins here in Switzerland for the Jan Michalski Foundation. So, this should be built or begin the process of being built. I was in Moscow because we were shortlisted for the new National Center for Contemporary Arts and this is the site of the competition and in a month I cannot show this because there are no projects yet. The site is really amazing as an old landing strip for military aviation and this is the site of the museum 360 meters long and you can build up not more, the asset, please not more than 175 meters high and the entire place is one kilometer long. A project, a competition we won for the Tehran Stock Exchange some months ago now. Now I'm mixing what we're doing abroad and what we're doing in Chile and this is a good way to bridge both set of projects. This is in Chile but it's an initiative that has eight Japanese architects and eight Chilean architects building on the Pacific Ocean. Toyoito was the curator for the Japanese side as you see among the Japanese is Kasuyosejima, Ryunishi Sawa, Ken Gokuma, Atelier Bo Wou, Yunye Ishigami, here is Sofu Jimoto. So really nice Japanese architects working on this side. So each of us is given a plot and then building a private house there. This is our design. And here starts all the Chilean part of what we're doing today. A couple of schools, two schools actually on the construction in the poor areas. I will present in more detail the constitution but just to show the different buildings, construction from the cultural center of this city destroyed by earthquake and tsunami. Housing project 100 kilometers south from Santiago. The theater of constitution, the same city that we had to work on for a forest company, many things. An astronomical center in Santiago. By 2020 Chile is going to have 70%, 70% of the observation capacity of the world due to the clear skies in the north, in the desert. And this is going to be connected to that school. This is what we already built. Now we're working on that promenade here. We won the competition for our own idea because it was taken over by the state and then we had to compete to be able to work in our own idea. Reconstruction of the city of constitución again, another park to protect the city against tsunami. So it's mainly a forest on the coastal line. Public spaces in the same city. The touristic route on the river. Some also sports facilities. For another forest company in the south. And this is part of how big companies have to relate with communities. And another project. There's another person doing the master plan for this, but we were commissioned to work on that corner plus the entire length of the site in the public space and infrastructure. A project we are working on for the Chilean copper corporation that started with this. We called it a social tsunami. A variety of people complaining about bad quality of life while producing the wealth for the country. So this is Calama, the city in the north. And this is the Atacama Desert. Not far from here are also all these astronomical observatories. And we started somehow this was our starting point or our building materials. This is a sport facilities among other things. Another competition for our own idea for the entire city. But this one we were able to put forward the park along a four kilometer park along the city edge. This is a, I think it makes sense to stop here and take, in Spanish says, this is the committee of personal defense that will fight until death against MLP is the mining company for making our citizens right to prevail. We will not allow the mining company to fool people if they think that giving away money, they will change our way of thinking. This is pretty much the case for many of the productive companies in the countries that are requiring what we call a social license to operate. Besides the environmental permissions and besides the legal and the traffic or whatever they have to see, they have to negotiate with local communities to be able to operate. And design and city design, at least in what we have found to be a way to move forward, has been that negotiation too. Very concrete where demands and resentment and even violence can be channeled to make proposals to millerate quality of life of communities. So I guess this is one of the biggest new opportunities that we're facing in this area. So what are we working today is like this. This place is abroad Chile, but mainly maybe two thirds of our work. It's finally in the country. So this is where we are to be able to now in the last, I don't know how much time I have left, 20 minutes or something to focus on the two projects or three projects I wanted to show. Innovation center, social housing and reconstruction of the city after Tsunami. The Angelini Innovation Center at the Catholic University. This approach is not a method, is not a theory, is not a recipe and is just a way that we feel comfortable with to be able to start thinking and also start talking with clients. Started with the Novartis project actually when we were trying to answer the question of what form may allow for knowledge creation. Is there in a particular architecture that can encourage, facilitate knowledge creation? Actually from that project, this form of work about the use that we had to verify that in the building, the formal working individually on your desk delivering what you have to deliver or collectively in the form of meetings could be verified but also the informal work of formal working. But individually when you're just enjoying outdoor space or just trying to think out loud or meeting randomly with other people at coffee break or while smoking or whatever. So all these forms of work had to be verified in the building. So this is one of the things that should inform, X is the form of the building. We don't know yet how the building is going to look like but we know that at least these four form of works have to be here. Even the site that we were given and the amount of square meters that we needed to accommodate, we knew we had to go hike so it was going to be between 10 and 13 stories high. And while you go hike, you know that high buildings are good for looking out so you get good views but normally have no idea what is going on in the other floors. And for innovation or knowledge creation or at least as a learning community or creative community to be able to look what others are doing is important. So this high vertical structure had to verify that people could see what others were doing vertically. Actually, the circulation system, the elevators are a way to shop or look at what others are doing while going up and down. For having something to do up, a restaurant on top of the building and a cafeteria on the ground level so I get social spaces are distributed along the building and maybe one of the most important and so I'm not going to go through all this but as you see, they are very practical, concrete things. There are other things that are hard to tackle like the character of the building. We knew that the building had to be austere and timeless. We thought it was very tricky for an innovation center to be too contemporary. The risk of becoming obsolete too soon is rather high. And actually, this was the reason, this plus that being efficient regarding the environmental performance of the building was one of the reasons why we were that close to lose the project. You have to imagine a corporate client donating money for an innovation center. So what do they want? A glass, shiny, contemporary building pointing at the future. We knew this was irresponsible to be proposed in a weather like the one of Santiago where you have to avoid direct sun radiation on the glass. So we knew we had to have resist windows. Also because of seismic conditions, also because of the environment, it was better to go the other way than the typical approach of an office building where you have a dark, massive core and then a transparent perimeter that in the end ends up being completely covered with curtains, shutters because you cannot work when the sun is hitting the glass directly, at least in a weather like the one of Santiago. So we wanted to bring the mass to the perimeter and then have a transparent core. That meant that the building was not going to be glass and for the client, at least part of the client, not all of the client, that's why actually we won finally the building, was unacceptable. So the character tends to be one of the most important things that even though it's hard to talk about them is what clients tend to appreciate the most without knowing why, but they just like or do not like things. By this I mean that while trying to identify what is pertinent, it is not only about rational, functional, speakable things. It does have that I don't know what kind of thing that is there, but better to try to put it there even though you cannot speak about them. It's what I would call the unspeakable certainties. If you have them there, at least you pay attention to them with the corner of the eye. So going back to the global local question, which is hard to deal with, at least for us, we thought that when we're trying to identify carefully, and this is just a final slide, I mean the amount of things we did before arriving to this, designing the question, many, many alternatives, sometimes we had less, sometimes we had more, then we took some things out. So this process for us was very important. So I'm just going to show the conclusion of that. So these are the renderings of the building. As you see, it's 11 stories high. Each of these blogs is three stories. And this is the construction site maybe three weeks ago. You will see that we have other pictures, not this one. Yeah, but this one, we already arrived to the last floor here. We arrived to the last floor. So in about two weeks from now, the structure of the building is going to be finished. So that's one thing about pertinence. Identifying properly what is the case, answering with what is the case. Second project is social housing. So evidence shows that a middle class family lives reasonably well in around 70 to 80 square meters. If there's money, be it public money or private money in the form of saving, then there's no problem. But what if there's no money? Be it because it's a poor country or because families do not have enough money to go for their own solution in the private market. What the market tends to do is two things, reduce and displace. By reduce is squeezing the size to what money can, and in average in the world, you can build with public money between 30 and 40 square meters. So the market looks not enough money, equal small house. The other thing, displace, which is buying land or placing those units where land costs nothing. In developing countries, this explains the outskirts of cities in poverty belts or actually informality, where you don't even have access to public subsidies or public policies. So our first approach, going back to answering what is the case, was reframing the problem and thinking, what if instead of thinking as that size, which is with the public money we can build 40 square meters, considering it as a small house, what if we think that 80 square meters is half of a good house? So the same 40 square meters can be seen as a small house or can be seen as half of a good one, knowing that this is the good one. Now what you're saying is that it is going to be about incremental housing, and this exists in the world since the 70s. Not enough money, then allow people to complete what you cannot pay initially with public money. So this is not new. The new thing is that we say that that size could be half of a good house. And when you frame the problem as half of a good house, the key question is, which half do we do? And we thought that with public money, we had to do the half that a family cannot do individually. And we identified five designed conditions that belong to the half that families will not be able to do properly. They won't be able to change the location, they won't be able to change the urban layout, they are not going to be able to build the final structure, it's physically and technically difficult. The wet rooms and the stair are hard to achieve, and also they will never be able to change if it's not embedded in the first half, what we call a middle class DNA, size of rooms, height, that kind of thing. So this was one way of reframing the question before even going into the form. Second one, houses should be the opposite of cars. And these in other words is redefined quality. When you're complaining about social housing, at least in developing countries, the typical complaint is that too small, poorly built. So the intuitive reaction or the natural reaction, if we want to do quality units, well, let's make them bigger and better finished. That is answering well the wrong question. Because size and finishings belong to the half that families can do on their own. The definition of quality was let's try to avoid what normally happens in social housing, which is that the value of the property, the initial value, the initial cost actually goes down as happens with cars. This is particularly important because in a country like Chile, and this is pretty much the case for developing countries, housing policies are property oriented. When you receive a subsidy, you become the owner of the house. So this is a trespass of public money into a family's asset than one would like it to grow over time. It's extremely important for the family, but also for the state. And that evidence showed that that was not the case with the majority of the units, that after a couple of years, I mean an initial subsidy of $10,000, then you could buy these units because they're in the bad part of the cities, they deteriorate and the neighborhood is bad, you can buy them for $500 and even less. So we thought redefine quality, not as bigger, better built units, but as units able to gain value over time. If that happens, then housing can be seen as a social investment and not just as a social expense, which is normally the case with this housing policy. A small, relatively poor country like Chile, 17 million people, with, well, when we started the program, Chile had $6,000 to $7,000 per capita, now we're in $20,000 per capita. Nevertheless, the budget, the annual budget for the housing ministry was $2 billion. So if this is being trespassed to poor families, one would like those $2 billion to gain value over time. The importance of this is that housing should be seen not just as a shelter against the environment, but really as a tool against poverty. And design may have a say in this. Our first way to prove if this was possible, and again, if it's not built, it doesn't count, it was extremely important to be able to play within the same set of rules that everybody else was playing in the market. This was the problem that we were assigned to resolve back in 2003. There was a group of 100 families that lived in 5,000 square meters in the city center and we had to provide a solution for them in the same site with a subsidy of $7,500 that in the best of the cases allowed to build 30 square meters, knowing that with this money, $7,500, which is more or less as Swiss francs, we had to buy the land, provide the infrastructure and build the house. We only knew that the answer to that question was something in between a building and a house as a building efficient in land use that was extremely important and as a house able to grow. But we didn't know exactly where or what. The starting point was this community of 100 families with extremely poor living conditions, with the drug traffic, actually, because of the location within the city, but also this labyrinth configuration. And despite it was really bad as a living environment, the city around was highly desirable to be maintained. Because there is where jobs were, education was, health facilities, transportation, actually four blocks away from the beach, the alternative would have been and actually was for the last decades to expel the poor where you can buy land almost for nothing in the case of this small town in the north of Chile, 45 minutes away from the city, in the middle of the desert. So that desirable city that was around this neighborhood was expressed in the course of the land, three times more what social housing can normally afford. What we did and then trying to make a specific connection to the brief of the seminar, the engaging the conversation with the community. How do we engage with the community while having to deal with this? Well first of all for us participation is communication of constraints and information. Let's make sure that families because they're not stupid at all, treat them horizontally without oversimplifying the discourse, but also without making it more complex than necessary. Tell them all the constraints that we're having to deal with. And let's with them try alternatives. And our first exercise was okay, because we were warned by experts that the families were expecting isolated detached units. Anything else will not be accepted by the community. They're dreaming a lifetime of a house and eventually a house is what they get in that underserved periphery and they wanted to stay close where their jobs were of course. So we went there exercise. Okay, you want individual housing units, actually it's semi-detached. This is one unit, partition wall, another unit. Well, following the policy and the design limitations of the ministry, we can feed 32 families. If you can choose who the 70 that have to leave, fine. There's going to be only one problem. If we put the money of all these 30 families, we will not be able to even buy the land because it costs three times more than what social housing can normally afford. Even if we get that piece of land for free by a philanthropist, I don't know, some kind of thing. Individual detached units are unable to frame, control and help the incremental part knowing that families themselves are going to make that initial unit grow, are unable to help that growing process. So the growth happens despite the design, not thanks to the design. What you see here is maybe half a million units that have been built that way that are swallowed by informal construction. So what you get is the once again, the very poor quality neighborhood value goes down. It is just connected to sewage electricity and water, which is not bad as a public health policy, but not as a housing policy. So there was an agreement, and this is important, it was an agreement with the families that this was not an alternative. We made the exercise with another typology that is available in the market. It is slightly better, 60 units, but the problem with that is that whenever families had to grow and in this scenario they had to double the initial size, they either blocked bathroom and kitchens or had to go through another room to go to the next one. I am talking about three meter wide units. So this is what the policy accepted. So what you get instead of efficiency in the land use, it is overcrowding. So this was not an alternative either. Then go high, it is called the building block. So families threatened us to go to a hunger strike if we even dare to propose this as a solution. The reason is that the pressure for growth is so big that this kind of performance of constructions happen. Again, debilitating the structure, one of the major problems we had in the earthquake was not because of the quality of the construction, but because the intervention in the construction that debilitated the original structure. So if you don't consider that growth process in the initial design, then you are somehow part of the tragedy with deaths and everything after the earthquake. So this was not an alternative. And the conclusion with the families, and this was very important, is that we were in deep shit unless we come up with something new, we are not going to be able to answer this question. This is very important because sometimes participatory design is meant something like, well, let's think together and design together this unit. Well, not necessarily. I mean, this participatory process is about establishing priorities. They know better than us what they need first. But we know other things that they don't know. And we don't negotiate the things that we think it's professionally irresponsible not to do. So it's a very, again, transparent process of we being confident and not feeling guilty for having had the privilege of studying in the university and knowing things that they don't know. But because we are confident in our knowledge, we also know the other things that we don't know and we can accept those things. And this was a very intuitive process at the beginning. The only conducting point, I guess, was this horizontal conversation. Not feeling guilty, not being paternalistic. So the reframing of the process in that case was, okay, let's do a building because it's the only way to accommodate the hand with families and actually buy the land. But knowing that the building cannot grow, let's do the building and consider only those parts of the building that can grow, the ground floor and the upper floor. So what we did was a building that only had the ground floor and the upper floor. With a house underneath and an apartment on top and then with some boards in between to allow families to grow. I'm not going to be able to explain this, but just give the title because design matters in this case. In this case, the square was more efficient to overcome poverty than the rectangle. So how a non-architectural problem overcoming poverty was solved by the specific knowledge of architecture, the strategic use of form. We know the properties of squares and rectangles, but not for the aesthetic purpose of having a centered figure or where the space is in no tension or having tension or that kind of a no. It has other properties that are able to solve non-architectural issues. So for a given size, there was a way to accommodate more families with a square because of the rotation in the amount of corners that we had, that by allowing to fit more families within a given surface, allowed us to have more subsidies to buy the land. So all what I'm saying was not just a PowerPoint, it's through different workshops making sure that we were on the same page asking families to write and draw the facades where they were going to make the house growth and then you can anticipate because they were planning already to make it in the last place one would like it to happen or how they are going to intervene the courtyards. And this is how they thought the project was going to look like. The alternative for the same amount of money in that 45 minutes away, poor city was this. And with the same money, we had to prove that we had to be able to accommodate in a site three times more expensive. If they didn't lose their jobs, the expansion process will happen right away. So from that, very quickly I will just show that with the same approach of low-rise density without overcrowding with possibility of expansion, we tried to test different climatic conditions and social conditions throughout Chile. In hot weather in the north, in cold weather in the south, knowing for you to have an idea that Chile goes from Moscow to Mumbai. So this is the range that you are testing actually when you are building throughout the Chilean geography. And with that same approach, as I said, we went abroad. And all this is explained in 500 pages in the elemental book that was launched during the last Venice Biennale. And last thing, how to go from that scale to the entire city level. And the opportunity was provided by the earthquake in 2010, an 8.8 earthquake. Which earthquakes are not new for us, but what was new somehow was the tsunami. This is the city of Constitución, 12-meter high waves on the Pacific Ocean, and then went moving through the river with 6-meter high waves. So this is the demolition plan of the city of Constitución. And the question was how to rebuild. Due to the emergency, we were given 100 days, which was almost nothing to think and design an entire city, but an eternity for the people living on the streets. So we partnered with Vironi, a strategic communications company, to conduct the participatory design process at the entire city level. The first operation was to define a counterpart, a client, to guarantee the governance and feasibility of the operation. So by day 32, a consortium composed by the government, the municipality, and Arauca Forest Company was already in place. By day 40, an open house, a physical space in the main square of the city for the liberations about the reconstruction to be conducted in the most public and civic way, was already built. In the meantime, in order to give the plan a deep sense of reality, we started to swallow, as fast as we could, every single constraint coming from the bureaucratic apparatus. By day 50, countless meetings had already been conducted with almost every public department that had a project for the city. Specifically, me as a fisherman, I have 25 fishermen, where am I going to bring them to the woods? because we cannot have an army defense, of course, well done. So this is participation. I mean, that man, he's a fisherman, it's actually called Snow. He was, I mean, the discussion was about where they're going to be allowed to stay on the same place or not. So it's nothing even close to a romantic gathering and agreeing how the city of the future is going to look like. But nevertheless, that friction and that energy and resentment, if properly channeled through design, is the only way to change in context that otherwise have all the incentives to remain the same way there have been for decades. So this plan was about doing many, many things. I'm just going to focus on this. The mitigation park or the forest. How are we going to protect the city against the future tsunamis? Since this was a new thing, it was a new discussion in the country. What do we do? Attentive one, just forbid people to go to ground zero because it's dangerous. So that alternative, we thought it was unrealistic and would create that kind of settlement that would be even worse than what was there before. There's no resistance to future waves coming. So maybe if you're in Japan and you decide to forbid people to install on the coastline, they will obey and follow that. There's no way for that kind of attitude to happen in Chile. It will be legally taken by everybody anyhow. Second alternative, with a big, big lobby of the big building companies because it meant big contracts on building heavy infrastructure. Also politically, it was very good because just by building a wall over here, then there was no need to expropriate people from where they were originally living. Well, the problem with that is that to the amount of energy that nature uses while unraveling in the form of a tsunami, there's no way to resist such energy. So our alternative was instead of fighting against that amount of energy from the sea, let's try to dissipate that energy by a certain amount and introduce some friction. And the concept was that against geographical threats, you have to come up with geographical answers. So a forest that introduced corrugation and friction to reduce between 30 to 40% the energy, not just by the trees, but also by creating this landscape underneath. There were, of course, mathematical models and lab tests for doing that, but also empirical proof. The island in here allowed the waves that were here 12-meter heights, where 6-meter heights after losing and introducing chaotic movement within the waves. So this part of the city, if there was not an island here, would have been even more destroyed. So this was the approach that we proposed. The problem is that it was politically and socially more challenging because it required land expropriation. And the process of participation was meant to try to understand what do we have to gain, does it make sense? This is what we professionally consider being the best alternative, but does it make sense to you? And because of the participation process and also not only communicating to the people, but also to politicians, it was also the most difficult to push forward because the cost of each of the other alternatives was respectively cheaper. 30 million for just allowing people not to build here again. And the main cost here is buying all these people land. You had to buy this private property anyhow. Then 42 million for building heavy infrastructure and 48 million because it was a combination between expropriation of land plus some infrastructure to be built. What the process of participation allowed us was, well, mainly focusing better or understanding better what people preferred. In the sense that there were things that we may have not calibrated and measured properly. One of them was that there was a big concern about how to rebuild regarding the old heritage of the constructions that were in the city centre, old houses, nothing special, but at least there was some history connected to that. And the government, as a central decision, was thinking, okay, how are we going to rebuild? But families said, and the people of the city said, look, our identity is not really that much connected to old buildings, but to the river. What makes this city even exist is the presence of the river, but the access to the river was privately owned by around 15 people. So if we go for the third alternative, what you're going to be doing is to give democratic access to what the city considers being their main source of identity. No history, but natural resources. So this was the alternative of the park. Second thing, very important. People said, you know what, fine, we appreciate the concern about the tsunami, but this is going to happen maybe the next time in 20, 25 years. But every single year, we do have major problems with the flooding from the rain. So if you, by providing a solution on the shore, can solve what really is the problem of the city, which is flooding, that alternative to a big wall over here would have created a major, major threat for the entire city existence, then that may make sense also to move to the third alternative. I didn't mention that. It wasn't a slide, but I didn't mention it. There was a problem with the public city space standards, 2.2 square meters per person. That was absolutely under what is recommended by international standards, 9 by the OMS. So if we went for a park here, we could go from 2.2 to 6.6 square meters per person of public space in the entire city. So this combination of dealing with a problem that was more crucial than tsunamis, flooding, improving the quality of life for decades, we're asking and nobody had solved. And finally, putting the energy on what they felt was the real source of identity of the city allowed us to go for alternative three. And the swallowing of the bureaucracy was extremely important because we identified projects that were being conducted without any coordination. The SCARS's resource in city is not money, it's coordination. So nobody knew that this department, the department of Obras-Idraulica is from the Ministry of Public Works, the Water Works, and then this is the Port Authority and this is the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism. So each of them having projects on the same place without knowing that the other one was building on that. So the sum of the three of them was $52 million. And this was the way to explain that by doing the third alternative, it was not only socially and politically more valuable, but also it saved money. It just provided coordination within what was already approved as a national budget. And just to finish, this was last week. What we were discussing somewhere here, the river is here, a housing project following the elemental approach. This is the last thing that we have done as a design with this urban strategy of having courtyards for as private condominiums for each group of families. No time to go into the details, but just for you to know that we keep on trying to refine the design of this half of a good house instead of a small one. So President of the country opening the houses was two Fridays ago. So we went on Monday to look to take pictures. Here's the Trump poll is that concrete mixer. So already there's this dynamics of adding over the weekend. This is a wood structure. So the mixer, the concrete mixer is mainly for the floor. This one. Yes. Well, it's yes and no. What we have learned is that it's not they building the thing themselves with their hands. It's that if you identify that within the community, there are people that know about the construction sector, you meet with them and teach them how it is more efficient to do there. It is very intuitive in the sense that this is three meters for some example and would it so sell in Chile in 3.2. So you just cut the edges and then can feed without losing material. So there's an efficient way to provide that. And what they do is they sell for normally between one sixth and one seventh of the initial cost of the first half of the house, the second half. So it's a product, a group of workers sell to other families because they're not doing structural work that is complex. They're just enclosing space. That's the reason why the cost is several times less than the initial half. So again, in poor communities, it's not that the poor do not have money. They do not have in the form of a monthly income, but when they know they're going to get a property that is formal, they began to save when they knew that they were going to get in the house. And that was it. Thank you so much. I'm sorry, I know it was rather long, but if you still have some energy, I'm happy to answer a couple of questions or otherwise over the drinks. Yeah, let's take a few questions. First of all, thank you for your lecture. It was amazing to see the broad spectrum of what you're doing. I'm extremely interested in the statement you made about deploying design as a mitigator in complex processes in order to resolve, let's say, contradicting, interests, and you have always interests and you have always power at playing between these parties. And this is where design suddenly becomes an actor like the participants themselves. And you, as the architect, you're basically designing that actor on the run, because I assume the project is constantly changing in order to promote dialogue between the various parties. What interests me in that aspect is if you frame this in view of your first part of the lecture where you showed your work that you do in Chile and your work you do internationally. I assume in Chile you were probably, since you know the customs and you know how, you know the language, you know how to behave at participatory meetings, when you delocalize your practice into Texas, Europe, Russia now, you're facing entirely different cultural conditions that make it probably more difficult for you as a delocalized practitioner to deploy design as an actor in trying to resolve local problems. So I would be interested in this relationship. Yeah, it's absolutely true and crucial what you're mentioning. So let me start by saying that the provisional title of the approach, if there's any power in architecture, if there's any power in design, that's the power of synthesis. By that I mean that when entering complex problems, and maybe there's no one single architectural project that is not complex, but there are other that it might be even more charged like social housing or city design, even iconic buildings within the city. That complexity, if faced while trying to understand the different agendas, might not be solved ever. Actually, I will not mention a very important international company that works as a consultant, urban consultant or building consultant. Actually, the word consultant is the problem. You should be an author. In Spanish it works because consultor y no autor. So it even has the same sounding, but the difference between being a consultant and an author or taking the risk of making a proposal is that the paper of this big company started by having 72 80 pages of disclaimers of what they should not be blamed for. Design by having at its very core this synthetic tool, which is design and the project, organizes information in a proposal key. The biggest difference is that you're not stuck in at least diagnosis, but you jump directly into the void of making a proposal and all that energy and all that conversation, even the disagreements around something that is out there as a proposal. You then may change may iterate main main modify the thing, but you're talking about a proposal, not disclaimers, not not even the information that then will allow the client to make the decision. You make the decision and eventually if you know what you're talking about and you're confident about your skills, then you're open to receive those comments. The more closer you are to this non written loss that you're mentioning of being close to Chile where you can interpret better body language and what is being said but what is not really meant and all that. It might make it easier or at least faster, but nevertheless, what I think has proved to be crucial in any of this context is the capacity of architecture and design to organize a conversation around a proposal. That was the case in Texas where we as soon as we could where they're trying to be as concrete as possible, it's okay because if we start by trying to understand the world vision of Republicans and Democrats or why some people wanted more decoration in the building and more or looking the building as the original buildings, the older buildings, which by the way, where in where built in 1904 inspired in German architecture, Southern German architecture with pitched roofs for the snow in a context like Texas where it never snows. But nevertheless, we thought it was, it made it was nonsense to try to mimic that, but we wanted to understand. Okay, what are you looking after when you're demanding more decorate decoration. What is it that you like in old architecture without going too fast into the abstract box that is going to be published and it's going to look cool and but not does not take into consideration people's sensibilities and character and preferences. So, instead of having endless conversations about culture or aesthetics. What are we talking about what you want in the end the conversation was, are we going to have a red roof or not. This was the fine the ultimate discussion was about the red roof. With red roof, they thought it looked like a building without the red roof. They thought it looked like a rock or something like that. And that very concrete conversation is something yet that you can have because in front of you you have that synthetic object which is the design and this has been proved to be extremely healthy as a way to enter this full of friction processes. No matter you are eventually at the beginning less able to read the nonverbal clues. That's one thing. The other thing with is what I would say and this has been the case particularly for for social housing. When you reduce your answer to such irreducible core when you have taken out everything that is not absolutely necessary because there's no money to do otherwise. People are not that different everywhere in the world. So what we need in the end is pretty much the same thing. This is a Marguerite Jursenar in the Adriano's memoir where she says that a stair, a comfortable stair is comfortable today. And 2000 years ago for the Romans because we still have the same toes, the same feet actually. So I guess that that same universal, I don't know how to call it. I mean what we in the end need as a more basic core of relationships and physical need and it's rather pretty much the same everywhere and nuances and differences tend to happen anyhow in the second half of the house. We're not able not even for cultural distance. We're not even able to know family preferences and tastes the way they finish their houses. I mean, it is never the way we thought it would have happened. So by what I meant by when saying that scarcity as a tool for inclusion by not having enough money, we were forced to create an open system that allowed people to move in with their own preferences. And that tend which is the most difficult part where what it's hard to have to find an agreement that tends to happen anyhow. If what you're focusing on is the most irreducible core because that I think tends to be rather universal. Hello. It was a real pleasure to hear you obviously. Old friends I really admire what you've been doing because those of us who come from South America understand that the scarcity that he's being confronted with is our daily bread in Latin America. To get anything built is a huge struggle and there's never enough funds. And when he was telling us about the value of a house decreasing over time, he told one story which was it's in a bad neighborhood. It's badly built. It deteriorates. But there's another story, hyperinflation. Chile also went through some moments of inflation not now as it's grown to $20,000 per capita. Venezuela Caracas, Venezuela was $20,000 per capita in 1958. So you can imagine what that was for Venezuela. And now it's down to about $7,000 per capita on oil producing country. So this fluctuation gives you the framework which he's not, he began to show you the political framework, but gives you the framework of how it is difficult to become in work as an architect in Latin America, different from Europe. And this global and local idea is interesting and I'm going to touch on that. One of the most striking things Alejandro, I find in your work is the simplicity with which you work out some econometrics. You can use the econometrics of half a house or how with $7,000 you can produce a unit that's 30 square meters. So you boil it down to an economic idea, showing the forest and how much it would cost to expropriate. Tell me a little bit more about that relationship between economy and design. Okay, let me start by the scarcity thing, which I think is crucial. I feel, and this is not really a politically correct statement, I feel really privileged to have been educated in a country like Chile, whereas scarcity was the case because if anything, scarcity, it's a great filter against arbitrariness. You cannot do whatever you want, your personal artistic agenda or your view of the world that is so fantastic that somebody has to finance and put a building out there so that we can all share this innovation. You're forced to answer with what is strictly the case and one of the worst threats and risks of our profession and the way at least still we're very much educated in the world, maybe not here, which is a technical school, but that in definitely in our schools, which is the case for the majority of the architecture schools in the world. The scarcity or the other whiceness, the arbitrariness that things can be this way or the other way, it's always the biggest risk of being irrelevant. The highest price that we as architects are paying normally is irrelevance. We are not called to debate major issues. By having been trained in scarcity, you are within your muscles, your designer muscles, you answer with one nail, one hammer, one hit. That's it. You miss it, you don't have a second chance. And this is fantastic because to answer with what is the case in social housing, as I said, is not a choice, but it's highly desirable when you're working in projects with much more budget. The local global thing, again, when working for Novartis, where there was never a discussion about the budget, we still wanted to answer with an irreducible approach. And this is something that you carry on with you from having been trained under scarcity of means. What you carry the other way around, and this is very important going to the question of design, we are trying to enter in these issues, poverty, resentment, violence, development or under development as designers. We're not there as politicians or policymakers or writing paper, we want to do things. Actually, Elemental is called a do tank, as opposed to a think tank. Let's do something. And hopefully you change the conditions and the conditions are not good. But in the meantime, within the set of constraints, do something because definitely it can be improved. And for that improvement to happen, you need design being done at its most cutting edge. And that kind of skills are trained if you're dealing with projects that require high design standards like a Novartis building. So the trade off is that from high budget, highly sophisticated project, you bring your designer tools from social housing and scarcity and political projects, you bring the scarcity as a filter against arbitrariness. I guess that ultimately, relationship between economy or economics and design is that you're able to translate these non architectural issues into form. No question. No, but one thing. I know this. No, no, no question. And then it can't. I think that I when you mentioned about that the form had to be pertinent. And no, you're going to help me because I don't know if I can say that in English, but I mean the pertinence is something that agree or that understand exactly the goal. And that is it fit in the budget in the requirement and everything. So the answer, I think that has to be pertinent, but the architect not, you know, I think that the architect should not. Yeah, not pertinent. Yeah. I mean, as a person and I think that you act a lot like this, your answer are very pertinent, but as I mean, not pertinent, just to not be misunderstood is not to to agree with the world like it is right now, you know, and that's what I meant by saying that there are. I mean, one can see these things as equations. And actually, there are sometimes presented as if they're equations, but not because we believe this is a science, not even because we have a method or or or an ideology of how to approach the thing. The only interesting and useful thing about framing it as an equation is that at least you know the terms that you have to deal with, even with if some of those terms are not speakable. I mean, you just know the thing. It's this unspeakable certainties and even is sometimes being pertinent means to answer with something that was not contained in the set of constraints. It's about balancing, I guess, being reasonable, common sense, because you want to build the thing you you are realistic. I mean, you're not dreaming awake. But there's some boldness required. There's some. The answer is not necessarily contained in the existing conditions. If it was, then eventually you're not being pertinent because you're just solving something and a proposal is different different from a solution. It's not the same thing. You are bringing the thing to the next level, but that next level has to be far away enough so that is a potential of the things that but not that far away. That is completely disconnected, not also too close because otherwise you may not have tackled the real unspoken problem of not having had a coordination previously. So that's why for us, it's it's very hard to teach, for example, nobody nobody's teaching in the office because it requires to be much more clear than we are. We may know some things, but we're we have really problems trying to speak about those things. We just know some of them. And so I guess the do tongue thing, it's very crucial in our approach and more clarity about this. It's it's hard. I mean, I guess I'm touching the limit of how far I can go in in opening the thing without being too obscure. You can imagine I had to respond to the do tank versus think tank. I just want to say that I have to debate a little more. I think it's really interesting the pertinence of this idea that a built work is the only significant thing. And that and I want to get into that more. I think about Super Studio. I think even about your equation of half a house, whether that is really a built thing or that is actually a conceptual thing. I think about the fund palace by Cedric Price. I think about some arctic grams ideas of walking city. And I start to think whether it is necessary to build or a project can be also an equation. A text by John Turner, for instance, or or can be something else. And you ended on your book, of course, or in one of the moments close to the end of the project section. So a book can be a project too. So I want to debate a little more on why you believe so hardly the architects must intervene physically. Yeah, no, I to be honest, I didn't I wasn't having it here in this part of my attention, the urban think tank. The truth and the reason why it's important for me, the do tongue has to be measured against where it started at Harvard in 2000, where teaching a social housing studio was the least cool thing you could ever think about ever. I mean, it was just just not cool to do social housing is that but everywhere, even Chile. I arrive at Harvard not knowing what a subsidy was. So it's not just for the others myself, never had any contact in it with the public world in a country where 60% of what's being built uses some kind of subsidy. I had no idea what a subsidy was. So out of self embarrassment, I decided that I may should do something with this. Actually, it's not even true. Somebody, a partner, a transport engineer that made the right questions and allowed me to go into the world that I had no the right tools because I was trained differently in an architecture school. What it made me nervous though, and that was the title of the first studio I taught at Harvard, this other wiseness thing with arbitrariness is that. And this was my my partners approach. He was complied about his at you architects, including me. When you're entering a field. And the possible outcome begins to be or has have a risk or there's some kind of threat that is not going to look right. Then you change the question. So you begin to accommodate the information so that your final result, it's clean, cool, it still can make it to the magazines and be published. The reaction was against that cleanness. Cool environment of projects that might be fantastic on paper, but never were willing to walk the talk and see what will happen to them if they tried to get built. And the main thing was to develop a new skin so that we are we're comfortable with the gray areas with things that were ugly, not not eventually the perfect. But it was good perfection is the enemy of good. And so try to develop can we survive with if we're judged within the architectural world. It was very crucial to have an engineer partner because when we met and he said, why don't we do something with social housing. For me in my architects mind do something meant a seminar, an exhibition, publication, a workshop for him do something meant let's build the company and go out there and build 100 units at least. Otherwise, we're not if we have eventually have a point. Nobody will believe us. So in order to go for that, we had to abandon, let's say the way of measuring our practice. And the reason of course you have to imagine what does it mean to and I was saying but look in social housing it's it. We're not going to make it to a cookies we're not going to make it to the Pritzker prize and he was looking at me. The Pritzker what for he Pritzker prize couldn't care less. I mean, for his mind, he said, look, I prefer a hundred lines in the economist than a hundred pages in a crocus because there you may eventually notice early change things that matter. So the do tank thing is was a reaction of trying ourselves to change who was going to listen to us we were going to talk to and eventually what our outcome was going to look like knowing that it was a lost battle if we were to try to be judged within the cultural community and and and this is why it became a for profit company. The complete different mindset that again, I still today don't know how it works. I mean, I cannot open Excel sheet. But then the thing is that you don't you don't have to learn all these things. You just have to partner with somebody that does. Questions from from the students. Yeah. So I'm curious as a future potential planner, I'm curious about how do you find your position in such project that's that that you in which you struggle between the powers of government and citizens and different stakeholders. Are you more like a dictator or are you more like a democratic in a democratic environment for discussion. It's an interesting question. And again, I maybe the reason why we enter these fields is because we have no idea if we knew we wouldn't enter. I mean, the amount of things that you have to go through. There's so much that it may be ignorance. It's the only way to be able to have the courage to enter the thing. But intuition at the beginning and now it's more conscious. A few things. First, do not identify the one that pays your check with the one that you're reporting to Chilean copper corporation is hiring us. Clearly said, before anybody, politicians, community, other companies, but yes, we're being paid and hopefully very well because this is a tough question. We're going to have to spend quality time in here and we want to be paid well because this is extremely difficult. So this is the first thing. Clarify that it is not voluntary work. I mean, these issues are so difficult that they require professional quality, not professional charity. So volunteer work will never answer difficult questions. Sorry. I mean, it requires professional quality, not professional charity. Once that is said, condition, okay, you're paying my check, but I'm reporting to somebody that is bigger than you. So you heard in the reconstruction after the earthquake, it was the same case for all the other big projects that we're dealing with. First thing, have a client, a counterpart that is bigger than the one paying your check. Government, municipality, plus a company, if it's the case of a company, plus the community. So empower community because they have to be there. Not just for a democratic approach, which is, I think it's nice. It's okay to be as democratic as possible. But besides this kind of good intentions, there's a very practical reason. Changes in cities happen in periods of time that are much longer than political times. Administrations, a presidency lasts four years, a mayor four years, until a president cannot be re-elected. So you know it's four years. Eventually a mayor can be re-elected, but not necessarily clear. And changes, significant changes in cities happen over periods of time, of decades. If you have community taking part as a client, they are the only ones that are going to be there during the next mayor, during the next minister, during the next president. So that client that we are reporting to has at least other institutions that were created to, at least in principle, take care of public good, governments, the state, the municipality, they are there for the public good. There's a problem with, if you only work with the government, at least in the case of the Chilean situation, being a relatively poor country, the only way you can justify investment in different projects is that if you're overcoming a deficit. If you want to go beyond the deficit, there's not money. And all the problems that we are facing in a $20,000 economy is not about basic needs, it's not about deficits. We already achieved that. The new problems are much more complex. People are demanding beautiful cities, quality of life. I mean, you see the complaints that it's not about having water switched. I mean, it's the next generation of problems, and the state architecture is only prepared to overcome a deficit. If you have private companies inside the client, well, they're designed to create profit. I mean, they have something to gain. They frame the information in the form that they are going to move to the next phase. Just remaining even is not enough for a company. So each of the stakeholders, and this is the reason why we are creating these consortiums, has something to put into which is a good thing and some bad thing that is controlled by the other one. So I guess that once you're there having public, private community, and you place yourself in the center, again, this car's resource there is going to be synthesis. And the only way to establish a communication once you have designed your own client is to be able to organize all that information on a proposal key, and I go back to the previous question. Thanks for the speech, and your solution is really interesting. And you actually allow, leave space and allow individual families to build the second half of their house. I just wonder whether it is possible for the families to rent the second half out to others after the construction or invite other family members to live with them. If so, that means an increase to the population, and it will cause great pressure to the public facilities such as roads, water supply, and the schools and others, which I suppose should be provided according to the original population. So I just wonder what do you think of this problem during your design? Thank you. I think it's a good question, and it goes back to individual freedom. There are some things that you can't coordinate, centralized as a government, even as a company. There are some things that you cannot control, and you have to be okay not to be able to control. If you're creating an open system, you're not just opening space for different aesthetic preferences. You're opening the creation of space for different family structure, different economical needs. The experiences that we have had is that there are people that immediately bring relatives to live with them because there's the need. Others need a shop at home. A guy with a taxi needs to park the taxi inside the house. Otherwise, the next morning, it's not going to be there. Other people have animals, other people have a lot of children, other people are old and don't need more space, but need that outdoor ground floor accessibility. It's so hard to respond with one single design to that that only if you're creating a system that is open enough, then you're going to be able to accommodate such diversity. If people want to go against their own good, what can I say? I mean, it's up to them. Do you have any control of the entire plan of system from ratios or the area of the plan? Well, in theory, yes. In practice, no. There's a rule. I mean, the second very practical thing. We have entered the design to the municipality building department as a final stage. And they said, okay, we're delivering just the first phase, but the second phase is already approved from the municipality. So the families, in theory, are only allowed to build that second half because that's what's legal. But if they don't do that, it's up to them. But what do we do? Knowing that even if they might want or have the intention to do that, they might have lost their plans or they were coming to the meetings and saying, yeah, here you put a wall, here you put a window, and they're saying like that, and they go out of the meeting and they had no clue you were talking about. They don't know how to read a plan, for example. It can happen. So what we do is to follow what we call the minimum effort law. Let's design, prepare for what is going to be faster, cheaper, and easier to do. If you want to stick out of the facade, you can do that eventually, but it's more costly. It is faster, cheaper, easier to make a beam from A to B. We know that, they know that, and even if they forgot the plans or lost them, when they go to buy a beam, look at the space, measure the thing, the easiest way to connect A to B is the same way the design was thought and anticipated. So I guess that the minimum effort law is something that is quite strong. I would say it's another way to call it, it's common sense. Thank you very much for your talk, and it is really fascinating as you show that you are really able to participate in different phases of the design process and to talk to so many different stakeholders. For me, it's also interesting to see that you're able to work in different fields of operations, different scales, and this is where I tried to fit my question in, and you also showed many landscape projects, a project where you design open public space, the one with the funicular on the slope, the deprimonade, and the one on this park on the ground zero. I would say landscape architectural projects per se are characterized by different conditions. The notion of public and private space, space ownership, in most cases you design a process, not a product, etc. So also the public participation processes are kind of modified. So does your project philosophy scheme you showed, you told us this is not a recipe, this is not a guideline, but does it heavily change when you do landscape architectural projects, or let me put my question in another term, is it possible to design half of a good landscape, not only half of a good house? It's a good question. We have thought the same thing about infrastructure. We have thought about designing half of a good city, and not the entire city, because if you channel properly the forces that are around cities, you know, economical forces, legal forces, environmental forces, social, eventually if that first half has been correctly or intuitively read, you may do so. I have to start answering by maybe one step backwards. When we have the X in the center of this cloud that we're trying to understand that will be informed, is it not only about the form, sometimes it's about what to do. What this community will require a park or a public or infrastructure will be the solution for this project, be a building or be, eventually the conclusion is that you know what, they need just better professors and teachers, and it's not our realm, and let's ask another consultant for bringing better professors. What to do in the first place? It's the kind of questions that we have to be open to. It was not there because it's a very recent thing. Actually, while I'm traveling here, part of the partners of the office are in Peru, having conversations with a mining company. They fabricate pipes and tubes. They're going to invest or need to invest an incredible amount of money with a community that already blocked a $10 billion investment because they did not follow the right approach or whatever. So they decided, okay, one step back. I think that before even thinking of how we're going to operate, we need to establish some relationship with this community, but we don't know how. We have pipes and they said, what if we make a moving park? A park that we can transport from one place to another because if there's anything that we know how to do, it's logistics. They're very good in logistics, but there's mainly about delivering goods. Could it be that we would deliver and use our logistics skills in delivering urban quality of life? So we thought that this was to do a moving park. I have no idea what it's going to look like. Is it going to be moved with trucks or with trains? I don't know. But it goes back to maybe the park is just the children playground. It's not about the greenery of the thing. So I guess that we spent a lot of time when I say trying to understand the right question and not answering well the wrong question. Well, if you two immediately jump into a park equal landscape, we might be answering well the wrong question. And when we are open also that is if as a conclusion of that process, the job was not for us. Fine. Great. Thank you very much, Alex Alejandro for coming to Zurich and let's continue the discussion with the glass of wine. Thanks a lot.
 Nonetheless, I would like to welcome you to the first NSL lecture, the 2013 NSL lecture,  the first in a series of annual events supported by the network city and landscape of ETH Zurich  and hosted by one of its professors. Every year, another professor will host this NSL lecture,  either from the Department of Architecture or the Department of Civil Engineering. Good,  I would like to specifically welcome a colleague of mine, Professor Bernd Scholl,  former director of the NSL, whose idea it was to launch this annual event on pertinent themes  pertaining to the urbanization of the globe. Particularly, I would like to express our  gratitude to the NSL colleagues for making the funds available, and we are going to talk about  funds today, so I thought it is important to mention that, funds available to invite speakers  from remote regions of the world at the front edge of the discipline. So, thank you, Bernd,  for your farsighted vision. We decided to invite, as our first speaker in this series,  Alejandro Aravena. Thank you for coming. Indeed, coming from very far away, namely Chile,  to come to talk to us literally on the other side of the globe here in Zurich,  and I heard that you did a detour via Moscow, so the globe is getting smaller as we speak.  The reasons to invite him are many faults. First, we were intrigued many years ago by his take on  economy in the design of buildings, particularly for those inhabitants without means. Building,  for example, only 50% of a house leaving the rest to be completed by its inhabitants over time.  Here design encompasses the design of a strategy, of an economic strategy, a contribution to the  discipline, specifically considering how naive architects often are when asked to address  monetary issues. So, this was the first reason. The second one, he surprised many members of  the architecture community when establishing, in addition to his architectural atelier and studio,  Elemental, together with others, as a for-profit company. We have many friends that did non-profit  companies, but you had the audacity to do a for-profit company, albeit one dedicated to social  issues and social housing, a sector normally associated by architects to be certainly non-profit,  but not profitable. Third, he had the boldness to seek partners from industries that are generally  considered taboo by so-called proper architects that we know so well in this country. In the case  of Elemental, a liaison with a prominent Chilean old company, and this to engage in a dialogue on  scarcity. So, we thought Alejandro to be brave or dashes outrageous. So, this is the reason why  we invited you. So, as expected, he managed to surprise us again when inviting him, clearly  making the point that he did not want to talk about money as a resource passé, but on the power  of synthesis of form as a scarce resource on the globe and trying to tie this with a subject matter  delocalizing or deglocalized that we have set as a theme of this seminar. So, please welcome Alejandro  Agavena. Okay, well, thank you so much for the invitation. I think today it will be an excessive  presentation. I have an incredible amount of slides. The reason is that the theme of this  seminar delocalized being local, global. It's a question we never ask ourselves in our practice.  So, I was locked in the room until half an hour ago trying to put together things that we never  thought about. And I think it was a good exercise to look from outside at this moment. How are we  entering the question raised by the seminar? So, my first thought that trying to understand or even  choose or think or define global or local in the way it was phrased in the brief, it could be a  tricky question. And instead of having to choose one or the other, maybe the only thing that we  are trying to do at least in our practice, so consider this kind of showing as honestly as  possible what are we doing on our everyday practice is that having never thought about are we  being local, are we being global, what we're trying to do is to be pertinent. And pertinent means to  answer first what is the case is the sense of try to understand what is the question that needs to  be answered. There's nothing worse than answering well the wrong question. You will see how crucial  this was for social housing. So pertinent meaning answering what is the case with what is the case.  Once you have framed the problem correctly, I guess, and this is then my proposal, one should be  able to synthesize the proper answer for that proper question. Identify carefully what informs  the form of a project. And I guess this is the only thing that we are trying to do in the office.  Trying to understand what informs the form of a project. This has proved to be a very direct,  simple way to communicate with the client, with communities, with governments, with ourselves to  verify at the end of the process if what we're trying to do was achieved or not,  will have to be redone. So to understand that double approach of being pertinent, answering what  is the case with what is the case, the presentation today will have five parts. If we ran out of  time and then the drinks seem to be too tempting, we can stop and keep on having a conversation  over drinks. So the first thing was being in the debate about global and local, it was an  opportunity to look very quickly where have we had projects so far. If there's local or global,  where have been working and eventually what have we learned from that? Second, what are we doing  today? To understand this is an exercise we never did in the office. You just know you're doing  many things but never know how many things you're doing. And actually, truly, this is the first  time I look at what we're doing and I have to confess I was a little bit scared. Then I would  like to give one example, only one. What do we mean by trying to design the question in identifying  what informs the form of a project? Then I would show in detail which I guess is what you're  interested in the social housing project of Elemental, where scarcity ended up being a tool for  inclusion. This may sound counterintuitive, normally scarcity is associated to exclusion, in  this case for us, meant an opportunity for including people. And finally, one example of  participatory design at a much bigger level than what we have done on social housing, which is a  reconstruction of an entire city after the 2010 earthquake. So this is the menu for the afternoon.  So, very quickly, what have we done so far and where? Eventually, just a few comments here about  buildings that were the first building we did outside Chile. Knowing that the global local  thing is the lens through which I'm going to present this. First building outside Chile in the  U.S. in Texas, what was informing the form of the project, the weather, the labor, the available  labor, Mexicans, brick masons. And then a very, I guess, true discussion in the end with the client  in a board of trustees that have Republicans, have Democrats in Austin, Texas, which is, by the way,  the only democratic voting city in Texas. And the debate was about being abstract or nostalgic. So  I'm not going to, of course, can't not go into the details, but these were the elements of this  soup. And the building was the way we synthesized those issues, trying to make an answer that was  the case. So labor, how are we going things to be finally built? So, again, very quickly. Second  project outside Chile, not in chronological order, after the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans, not  in Brad Pitt's foundation. Project for a bank, competition for a bank in Mexico. Very narrow  building for cross ventilation and then some, let's say, architectural themes. Is it one volume or  four volumes or both? Then Peregrino project also in Mexico, where the only goal was trying to provide  ventilated shaded space with a slope to sit on the ground for people that have worked for 100  kilometers and then able to walk back for that journey. A piece of infrastructure, more than  architecture. Also in Mexico, social housing, I'm going to explain this more in detail while  explaining Elemental. A project for a resort in Panama. A house near Sao Paulo in Brazil,  where we were interested in finally not having earthquakes as a context to design. So how free  could structure be, which is not our case in Chile. And also the weather that allows to really  question what is indoor and what is outdoor. So that was the entire exploration of this house.  Water on the roof to provide thermal mass. Another house in Brazil, at some point with  Angelo Bucci, we were developing the scheme for this house. This is the first scheme before  Angelo came on board. But again, the themes were already there. Continuity between interior and  exterior and taking advantage of the weather. Then this, I guess, was in 2007 when we were  called by Vitra to provide a project for that site close to the Sahara-Hadidz fire station.  In this case, the client question, specifically Rolf Elbaum. Well, this is what he asked. I would  like to do a workshop for children using an old garage that is close to Sahara's building. Please  do a direct building, a happy building, flexible so that we can reprogram it, use encouraging  materials environmentally efficient with low energy consumption, econotrally footprint,  recyclable materials that allow for future expansion with a disciplined floor and cheap.  So I guess that once, and this is extremely important, this is after having the experience of  framing the problem in such a way, this is what we have been trying to do once again ourselves,  without expecting to have such a good client to ask for that. And there were not many things that  could actually start from the material point of view that could answer that least. And wood was  one sandbricks and reed. And so we decided to go for the reed, which has very specific and  restrictive laws for slope. Then another building, a project we did for a winery in Germany. And the  main theme here was gravity, both for the building and for the winemaking process was near the Rhine  River. A competition where we were shortlisted for the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Chales for Vitra,  a house in Inner Mongolia, where the question we thought was about relating to vastness,  in this case the Gobi Desert. And so enclosing a territory, which is one of the ways to deal  with vastness, and then going up to try to dominate that vastness. A project we were called by  CETRA, the Finnish Innovation Fund, to answer the question of how to lower the carbon footprint  of Finland by innovating in the built environment. So this is mixed up. So this is a house in Mongolia.  And then a project for some real estate development near Geneva. So the projects I just showed regarding  the global local debate are placed here. The ones that really got built, only these three.  And only if it's built, it counts. Otherwise, it doesn't count. So doing projects here and  there unless you build them in general, in architecture, I guess that the only thing  that counts are those that are built. So from that thing, our global local debate is around  this part of America. So that was about the world. What about in Chile? Very quickly,  even faster than the end. First project I did, a private house. Then the mathematics  faculty. A school. Montessori school. The medical school of Catholic University. Private  house in the southern part of Chile. Architecture faculty in Santiago. Another building for Catholic  University. Computer science building. Children's park here and within the metropolitan park.  So this is Santiago. So this park on this hillside. And more recently, actually, it was opened  a couple of weeks ago. Chile commemorated the 40 years of the military coup in September  11th that happened in 1973. So this is the bombing of the presidential palace and then  the Pinochet afterwards for 17 years. And I want to show this not only because it's  built, so it counts. But without explaining it too much, this is what I mean by trying  to understand what informs the form of the project. Three weeks before September 11th,  actually no, five weeks before that we were called by the mayor of Santiago because they  were approaching the 40 years and they didn't know what to do. The other things they wanted  to do were very likely to be politically questionable because we have presidential elections.  These years they wanted to do something that was not mixed or seen as that mayor supporting  a specific presidential candidate. So the only thing they knew that it has to be something  physical, something concrete. It could have been a festival, it could have been a monument.  So during the meeting I was writing down what could possibly inform what we were going to  do. So again, not explaining that, but it was trying to create a civilized conversation  among people because we thought that was at the very base of the crisis that our country  went through in 1973. So talking and being listened, gathering in a balanced way. So  we produced these objects to be distributed throughout the city, the entire city, to have  conversations in the public space. And then during one day a year, this commemoration  with 11 flowers. So there's a quick video on this event which I think would be shown.  Sorry, that guy here, he was the chief of press of Allende and he was in the Moneda,  in the presidential palace when the bombing happened. And so he survived the bombing and  that is his grandson.  Thank you  So, all these two things is where we have worked outside Chile and within Chile.  But what are we doing today regarding again this kind of global local thing?  Where I unfortunately I'm not allowed to show images for the Novartis building in the China  campus, but it's under construction.  We just won a competition for writers' cabins here in Switzerland for the Jan Michalski  Foundation.  So, this should be built or begin the process of being built.  I was in Moscow because we were shortlisted for the new National Center for Contemporary  Arts and this is the site of the competition and in a month I cannot show this because  there are no projects yet.  The site is really amazing as an old landing strip for military aviation and this is the  site of the museum 360 meters long and you can build up not more, the asset, please not  more than 175 meters high and the entire place is one kilometer long.  A project, a competition we won for the Tehran Stock Exchange some months ago now.  Now I'm mixing what we're doing abroad and what we're doing in Chile and this is a good  way to bridge both set of projects.  This is in Chile but it's an initiative that has eight Japanese architects and eight Chilean  architects building on the Pacific Ocean.  Toyoito was the curator for the Japanese side as you see among the Japanese is Kasuyosejima,  Ryunishi Sawa, Ken Gokuma, Atelier Bo Wou, Yunye Ishigami, here is Sofu Jimoto.  So really nice Japanese architects working on this side.  So each of us is given a plot and then building a private house there.  This is our design.  And here starts all the Chilean part of what we're doing today.  A couple of schools, two schools actually on the construction in the poor areas.  I will present in more detail the constitution but just to show the different buildings,  construction from the cultural center of this city destroyed by earthquake and tsunami.  Housing project 100 kilometers south from Santiago.  The theater of constitution, the same city that we had to work on for a forest company,  many things.  An astronomical center in Santiago.  By 2020 Chile is going to have 70%, 70% of the observation capacity of the world due  to the clear skies in the north, in the desert.  And this is going to be connected to that school.  This is what we already built.  Now we're working on that promenade here.  We won the competition for our own idea because it was taken over by the state and then we  had to compete to be able to work in our own idea.  Reconstruction of the city of constitución again, another park to protect the city against  tsunami.  So it's mainly a forest on the coastal line.  Public spaces in the same city.  The touristic route on the river.  Some also sports facilities.  For another forest company in the south.  And this is part of how big companies have to relate with communities.  And another project.  There's another person doing the master plan for this, but we were commissioned to work  on that corner plus the entire length of the site in the public space and infrastructure.  A project we are working on for the Chilean copper corporation that started with this.  We called it a social tsunami.  A variety of people complaining about bad quality of life while producing the wealth  for the country.  So this is Calama, the city in the north.  And this is the Atacama Desert.  Not far from here are also all these astronomical observatories.  And we started somehow this was our starting point or our building materials.  This is a sport facilities among other things.  Another competition for our own idea for the entire city.  But this one we were able to put forward the park along a four kilometer park along the  city edge.  This is a, I think it makes sense to stop here and take, in Spanish says, this is the  committee of personal defense that will fight until death against MLP is the mining company  for making our citizens right to prevail.  We will not allow the mining company to fool people if they think that giving away money,  they will change our way of thinking.  This is pretty much the case for many of the productive companies in the countries that  are requiring what we call a social license to operate.  Besides the environmental permissions and besides the legal and the traffic or whatever  they have to see, they have to negotiate with local communities to be able to operate.  And design and city design, at least in what we have found to be a way to move forward,  has been that negotiation too.  Very concrete where demands and resentment and even violence can be channeled to make  proposals to millerate quality of life of communities.  So I guess this is one of the biggest new opportunities that we're facing in this area.  So what are we working today is like this.  This place is abroad Chile, but mainly maybe two thirds of our work.  It's finally in the country.  So this is where we are to be able to now in the last, I don't know how much time I  have left, 20 minutes or something to focus on the two projects or three projects I wanted  to show.  Innovation center, social housing and reconstruction of the city after Tsunami.  The Angelini Innovation Center at the Catholic University.  This approach is not a method, is not a theory, is not a recipe and is just a way that we  feel comfortable with to be able to start thinking and also start talking with clients.  Started with the Novartis project actually when we were trying to answer the question  of what form may allow for knowledge creation.  Is there in a particular architecture that can encourage, facilitate knowledge creation?  Actually from that project, this form of work about the use that we had to verify that in  the building, the formal working individually on your desk delivering what you have to deliver  or collectively in the form of meetings could be verified but also the informal work of  formal working.  But individually when you're just enjoying outdoor space or just trying to think out  loud or meeting randomly with other people at coffee break or while smoking or whatever.  So all these forms of work had to be verified in the building.  So this is one of the things that should inform, X is the form of the building.  We don't know yet how the building is going to look like but we know that at least these  four form of works have to be here.  Even the site that we were given and the amount of square meters that we needed to accommodate,  we knew we had to go hike so it was going to be between 10 and 13 stories high.  And while you go hike, you know that high buildings are good for looking out so you  get good views but normally have no idea what is going on in the other floors.  And for innovation or knowledge creation or at least as a learning community or creative  community to be able to look what others are doing is important.  So this high vertical structure had to verify that people could see what others were doing  vertically.  Actually, the circulation system, the elevators are a way to shop or look at what others are  doing while going up and down.  For having something to do up, a restaurant on top of the building and a cafeteria on the  ground level so I get social spaces are distributed along the building and maybe one of the most  important and so I'm not going to go through all this but as you see, they are very practical,  concrete things.  There are other things that are hard to tackle like the character of the building.  We knew that the building had to be austere and timeless.  We thought it was very tricky for an innovation center to be too contemporary.  The risk of becoming obsolete too soon is rather high.  And actually, this was the reason, this plus that being efficient regarding the environmental  performance of the building was one of the reasons why we were that close to lose the  project.  You have to imagine a corporate client donating money for an innovation center.  So what do they want?  A glass, shiny, contemporary building pointing at the future.  We knew this was irresponsible to be proposed in a weather like the one of Santiago where  you have to avoid direct sun radiation on the glass.  So we knew we had to have resist windows.  Also because of seismic conditions, also because of the environment, it was better to go the  other way than the typical approach of an office building where you have a dark, massive  core and then a transparent perimeter that in the end ends up being completely covered  with curtains, shutters because you cannot work when the sun is hitting the glass directly,  at least in a weather like the one of Santiago.  So we wanted to bring the mass to the perimeter and then have a transparent core.  That meant that the building was not going to be glass and for the client, at least part  of the client, not all of the client, that's why actually we won finally the building,  was unacceptable.  So the character tends to be one of the most important things that even though it's hard  to talk about them is what clients tend to appreciate the most without knowing why, but  they just like or do not like things.  By this I mean that while trying to identify what is pertinent, it is not only about rational,  functional, speakable things.  It does have that I don't know what kind of thing that is there, but better to try to  put it there even though you cannot speak about them.  It's what I would call the unspeakable certainties.  If you have them there, at least you pay attention to them with the corner of the eye.  So going back to the global local question, which is hard to deal with, at least for us,  we thought that when we're trying to identify carefully, and this is just a final slide,  I mean the amount of things we did before arriving to this, designing the question, many, many  alternatives, sometimes we had less, sometimes we had more, then we took some things out.  So this process for us was very important.  So I'm just going to show the conclusion of that.  So these are the renderings of the building.  As you see, it's 11 stories high.  Each of these blogs is three stories.  And this is the construction site maybe three weeks ago.  You will see that we have other pictures, not this one.  Yeah, but this one, we already arrived to the last floor here.  We arrived to the last floor.  So in about two weeks from now, the structure of the building is going to be finished.  So that's one thing about pertinence.  Identifying properly what is the case, answering with what is the case.  Second project is social housing.  So evidence shows that a middle class family lives reasonably well in around 70 to 80 square  meters.  If there's money, be it public money or private money in the form of saving, then there's  no problem.  But what if there's no money?  Be it because it's a poor country or because families do not have enough money to go for  their own solution in the private market.  What the market tends to do is two things, reduce and displace.  By reduce is squeezing the size to what money can, and in average in the world, you can  build with public money between 30 and 40 square meters.  So the market looks not enough money, equal small house.  The other thing, displace, which is buying land or placing those units where land costs  nothing.  In developing countries, this explains the outskirts of cities in poverty belts or actually  informality, where you don't even have access to public subsidies or public policies.  So our first approach, going back to answering what is the case, was reframing the problem  and thinking, what if instead of thinking as that size, which is with the public money  we can build 40 square meters, considering it as a small house, what if we think that  80 square meters is half of a good house?  So the same 40 square meters can be seen as a small house or can be seen as half of a  good one, knowing that this is the good one.  Now what you're saying is that it is going to be about incremental housing, and this  exists in the world since the 70s.  Not enough money, then allow people to complete what you cannot pay initially with public  money.  So this is not new.  The new thing is that we say that that size could be half of a good house.  And when you frame the problem as half of a good house, the key question is, which half  do we do?  And we thought that with public money, we had to do the half that a family cannot do  individually.  And we identified five designed conditions that belong to the half that families will  not be able to do properly.  They won't be able to change the location, they won't be able to change the urban layout,  they are not going to be able to build the final structure, it's physically and technically  difficult.  The wet rooms and the stair are hard to achieve, and also they will never be able to change  if it's not embedded in the first half, what we call a middle class DNA, size of rooms,  height, that kind of thing.  So this was one way of reframing the question before even going into the form.  Second one, houses should be the opposite of cars.  And these in other words is redefined quality.  When you're complaining about social housing, at least in developing countries, the typical  complaint is that too small, poorly built.  So the intuitive reaction or the natural reaction, if we want to do quality units, well, let's  make them bigger and better finished.  That is answering well the wrong question.  Because size and finishings belong to the half that families can do on their own.  The definition of quality was let's try to avoid what normally happens in social housing,  which is that the value of the property, the initial value, the initial cost actually goes  down as happens with cars.  This is particularly important because in a country like Chile, and this is pretty much  the case for developing countries, housing policies are property oriented.  When you receive a subsidy, you become the owner of the house.  So this is a trespass of public money into a family's asset than one would like it to  grow over time.  It's extremely important for the family, but also for the state.  And that evidence showed that that was not the case with the majority of the units, that  after a couple of years, I mean an initial subsidy of $10,000, then you could buy these  units because they're in the bad part of the cities, they deteriorate and the neighborhood  is bad, you can buy them for $500 and even less.  So we thought redefine quality, not as bigger, better built units, but as units able to gain  value over time.  If that happens, then housing can be seen as a social investment and not just as a social  expense, which is normally the case with this housing policy.  A small, relatively poor country like Chile, 17 million people, with, well, when we started  the program, Chile had $6,000 to $7,000 per capita, now we're in $20,000 per capita.  Nevertheless, the budget, the annual budget for the housing ministry was $2 billion.  So if this is being trespassed to poor families, one would like those $2 billion to gain value  over time.  The importance of this is that housing should be seen not just as a shelter against the  environment, but really as a tool against poverty.  And design may have a say in this.  Our first way to prove if this was possible, and again, if it's not built, it doesn't count,  it was extremely important to be able to play within the same set of rules that everybody  else was playing in the market.  This was the problem that we were assigned to resolve back in 2003.  There was a group of 100 families that lived in 5,000 square meters in the city center  and we had to provide a solution for them in the same site with a subsidy of $7,500 that  in the best of the cases allowed to build 30 square meters, knowing that with this money,  $7,500, which is more or less as Swiss francs, we had to buy the land, provide the infrastructure  and build the house.  We only knew that the answer to that question was something in between a building and a  house as a building efficient in land use that was extremely important and as a house  able to grow.  But we didn't know exactly where or what.  The starting point was this community of 100 families with extremely poor living conditions,  with the drug traffic, actually, because of the location within the city, but also this  labyrinth configuration.  And despite it was really bad as a living environment, the city around was highly desirable  to be maintained.  Because there is where jobs were, education was, health facilities, transportation, actually  four blocks away from the beach, the alternative would have been and actually was for the last  decades to expel the poor where you can buy land almost for nothing in the case of this  small town in the north of Chile, 45 minutes away from the city, in the middle of the desert.  So that desirable city that was around this neighborhood was expressed in the course of  the land, three times more what social housing can normally afford.  What we did and then trying to make a specific connection to the brief of the seminar, the  engaging the conversation with the community.  How do we engage with the community while having to deal with this?  Well first of all for us participation is communication of constraints and information.  Let's make sure that families because they're not stupid at all, treat them horizontally  without oversimplifying the discourse, but also without making it more complex than necessary.  Tell them all the constraints that we're having to deal with.  And let's with them try alternatives.  And our first exercise was okay, because we were warned by experts that the families were  expecting isolated detached units.  Anything else will not be accepted by the community.  They're dreaming a lifetime of a house and eventually a house is what they get in that  underserved periphery and they wanted to stay close where their jobs were of course.  So we went there exercise.  Okay, you want individual housing units, actually it's semi-detached.  This is one unit, partition wall, another unit.  Well, following the policy and the design limitations of the ministry, we can feed 32 families.  If you can choose who the 70 that have to leave, fine.  There's going to be only one problem.  If we put the money of all these 30 families, we will not be able to even buy the land because  it costs three times more than what social housing can normally afford.  Even if we get that piece of land for free by a philanthropist, I don't know, some kind  of thing.  Individual detached units are unable to frame, control and help the incremental part knowing  that families themselves are going to make that initial unit grow, are unable to help  that growing process.  So the growth happens despite the design, not thanks to the design.  What you see here is maybe half a million units that have been built that way that are  swallowed by informal construction.  So what you get is the once again, the very poor quality neighborhood value goes down.  It is just connected to sewage electricity and water, which is not bad as a public health  policy, but not as a housing policy.  So there was an agreement, and this is important, it was an agreement with the families that  this was not an alternative.  We made the exercise with another typology that is available in the market.  It is slightly better, 60 units, but the problem with that is that whenever families had to  grow and in this scenario they had to double the initial size, they either blocked bathroom  and kitchens or had to go through another room to go to the next one.  I am talking about three meter wide units.  So this is what the policy accepted.  So what you get instead of efficiency in the land use, it is overcrowding.  So this was not an alternative either.  Then go high, it is called the building block.  So families threatened us to go to a hunger strike if we even dare to propose this as  a solution.  The reason is that the pressure for growth is so big that this kind of performance of  constructions happen.  Again, debilitating the structure, one of the major problems we had in the earthquake  was not because of the quality of the construction, but because the intervention in the construction  that debilitated the original structure.  So if you don't consider that growth process in the initial design, then you are somehow  part of the tragedy with deaths and everything after the earthquake.  So this was not an alternative.  And the conclusion with the families, and this was very important, is that we were in  deep shit unless we come up with something new, we are not going to be able to answer  this question.  This is very important because sometimes participatory design is meant something like, well, let's  think together and design together this unit.  Well, not necessarily.  I mean, this participatory process is about establishing priorities.  They know better than us what they need first.  But we know other things that they don't know.  And we don't negotiate the things that we think it's professionally irresponsible not  to do.  So it's a very, again, transparent process of we being confident and not feeling guilty  for having had the privilege of studying in the university and knowing things that they  don't know.  But because we are confident in our knowledge, we also know the other things that we don't  know and we can accept those things.  And this was a very intuitive process at the beginning.  The only conducting point, I guess, was this horizontal conversation.  Not feeling guilty, not being paternalistic.  So the reframing of the process in that case was, okay, let's do a building because it's  the only way to accommodate the hand with families and actually buy the land.  But knowing that the building cannot grow, let's do the building and consider only those  parts of the building that can grow, the ground floor and the upper floor.  So what we did was a building that only had the ground floor and the upper floor.  With a house underneath and an apartment on top and then with some boards in between  to allow families to grow.  I'm not going to be able to explain this, but just give the title because design matters  in this case.  In this case, the square was more efficient to overcome poverty than the rectangle.  So how a non-architectural problem overcoming poverty was solved by the specific knowledge  of architecture, the strategic use of form.  We know the properties of squares and rectangles, but not for the aesthetic purpose of having  a centered figure or where the space is in no tension or having tension or that kind  of a no.  It has other properties that are able to solve non-architectural issues.  So for a given size, there was a way to accommodate more families with a square because of the  rotation in the amount of corners that we had, that by allowing to fit more families  within a given surface, allowed us to have more subsidies to buy the land.  So all what I'm saying was not just a PowerPoint, it's through different workshops making sure  that we were on the same page asking families to write and draw the facades where they were  going to make the house growth and then you can anticipate because they were planning  already to make it in the last place one would like it to happen or how they are going to  intervene the courtyards.  And this is how they thought the project was going to look like.  The alternative for the same amount of money in that 45 minutes away, poor city was this.  And with the same money, we had to prove that we had to be able to accommodate in a site  three times more expensive.  If they didn't lose their jobs, the expansion process will happen right away.  So from that, very quickly I will just show that with the same approach of low-rise density  without overcrowding with possibility of expansion, we tried to test different climatic conditions  and social conditions throughout Chile.  In hot weather in the north, in cold weather in the south, knowing for you to have an idea  that Chile goes from Moscow to Mumbai.  So this is the range that you are testing actually when you are building throughout the Chilean  geography.  And with that same approach, as I said, we went abroad.  And all this is explained in 500 pages in the elemental book that was launched during  the last Venice Biennale.  And last thing, how to go from that scale to the entire city level.  And the opportunity was provided by the earthquake in 2010, an 8.8 earthquake.  Which earthquakes are not new for us, but what was new somehow was the tsunami.  This is the city of Constitución, 12-meter high waves on the Pacific Ocean, and then  went moving through the river with 6-meter high waves.  So this is the demolition plan of the city of Constitución.  And the question was how to rebuild.  Due to the emergency, we were given 100 days, which was almost nothing to think and design  an entire city, but an eternity for the people living on the streets.  So we partnered with Vironi, a strategic communications company, to conduct the participatory design  process at the entire city level.  The first operation was to define a counterpart, a client, to guarantee the governance and feasibility  of the operation.  So by day 32, a consortium composed by the government, the municipality, and Arauca  Forest Company was already in place.  By day 40, an open house, a physical space in the main square of the city for the liberations  about the reconstruction to be conducted in the most public and civic way, was already  built.  In the meantime, in order to give the plan a deep sense of reality, we started to swallow,  as fast as we could, every single constraint coming from the bureaucratic apparatus.  By day 50, countless meetings had already been conducted with almost every public department  that had a project for the city.  Specifically, me as a fisherman, I have 25 fishermen, where am I going to bring them to  the woods?  because we cannot have an army defense, of course, well done.  So this is participation.  I mean, that man, he's a fisherman, it's actually called Snow.  He was, I mean, the discussion was about where they're going to be allowed to stay on the same place or not.  So it's nothing even close to a romantic gathering and agreeing how the city of the future is going to look like.  But nevertheless, that friction and that energy and resentment, if properly channeled through design,  is the only way to change in context that otherwise have all the incentives to remain the same way there have been for decades.  So this plan was about doing many, many things.  I'm just going to focus on this.  The mitigation park or the forest.  How are we going to protect the city against the future tsunamis?  Since this was a new thing, it was a new discussion in the country.  What do we do?  Attentive one, just forbid people to go to ground zero because it's dangerous.  So that alternative, we thought it was unrealistic and would create that kind of settlement that would be even worse than what was there before.  There's no resistance to future waves coming.  So maybe if you're in Japan and you decide to forbid people to install on the coastline, they will obey and follow that.  There's no way for that kind of attitude to happen in Chile.  It will be legally taken by everybody anyhow.  Second alternative, with a big, big lobby of the big building companies because it meant big contracts on building heavy infrastructure.  Also politically, it was very good because just by building a wall over here,  then there was no need to expropriate people from where they were originally living.  Well, the problem with that is that to the amount of energy that nature uses while unraveling in the form of a tsunami,  there's no way to resist such energy.  So our alternative was instead of fighting against that amount of energy from the sea,  let's try to dissipate that energy by a certain amount and introduce some friction.  And the concept was that against geographical threats, you have to come up with geographical answers.  So a forest that introduced corrugation and friction to reduce between 30 to 40% the energy,  not just by the trees, but also by creating this landscape underneath.  There were, of course, mathematical models and lab tests for doing that, but also empirical proof.  The island in here allowed the waves that were here 12-meter heights, where 6-meter heights after losing and introducing chaotic movement within the waves.  So this part of the city, if there was not an island here, would have been even more destroyed.  So this was the approach that we proposed.  The problem is that it was politically and socially more challenging because it required land expropriation.  And the process of participation was meant to try to understand what do we have to gain, does it make sense?  This is what we professionally consider being the best alternative, but does it make sense to you?  And because of the participation process and also not only communicating to the people, but also to politicians,  it was also the most difficult to push forward because the cost of each of the other alternatives was respectively cheaper.  30 million for just allowing people not to build here again.  And the main cost here is buying all these people land.  You had to buy this private property anyhow.  Then 42 million for building heavy infrastructure and 48 million because it was a combination between expropriation of land plus some infrastructure to be built.  What the process of participation allowed us was, well, mainly focusing better or understanding better what people preferred.  In the sense that there were things that we may have not calibrated and measured properly.  One of them was that there was a big concern about how to rebuild regarding the old heritage of the constructions that were in the city centre,  old houses, nothing special, but at least there was some history connected to that.  And the government, as a central decision, was thinking, okay, how are we going to rebuild?  But families said, and the people of the city said, look, our identity is not really that much connected to old buildings, but to the river.  What makes this city even exist is the presence of the river, but the access to the river was privately owned by around 15 people.  So if we go for the third alternative, what you're going to be doing is to give democratic access to what the city considers being their main source of identity.  No history, but natural resources.  So this was the alternative of the park.  Second thing, very important.  People said, you know what, fine, we appreciate the concern about the tsunami, but this is going to happen maybe the next time in 20, 25 years.  But every single year, we do have major problems with the flooding from the rain.  So if you, by providing a solution on the shore, can solve what really is the problem of the city, which is flooding,  that alternative to a big wall over here would have created a major, major threat for the entire city existence,  then that may make sense also to move to the third alternative.  I didn't mention that.  It wasn't a slide, but I didn't mention it.  There was a problem with the public city space standards, 2.2 square meters per person.  That was absolutely under what is recommended by international standards, 9 by the OMS.  So if we went for a park here, we could go from 2.2 to 6.6 square meters per person of public space in the entire city.  So this combination of dealing with a problem that was more crucial than tsunamis, flooding,  improving the quality of life for decades, we're asking and nobody had solved.  And finally, putting the energy on what they felt was the real source of identity of the city allowed us to go for alternative three.  And the swallowing of the bureaucracy was extremely important because we identified projects that were being conducted without any coordination.  The SCARS's resource in city is not money, it's coordination.  So nobody knew that this department, the department of Obras-Idraulica is from the Ministry of Public Works, the Water Works,  and then this is the Port Authority and this is the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism.  So each of them having projects on the same place without knowing that the other one was building on that.  So the sum of the three of them was $52 million.  And this was the way to explain that by doing the third alternative, it was not only socially and politically more valuable,  but also it saved money.  It just provided coordination within what was already approved as a national budget.  And just to finish, this was last week.  What we were discussing somewhere here, the river is here, a housing project following the elemental approach.  This is the last thing that we have done as a design with this urban strategy of having courtyards for as private condominiums for each group of families.  No time to go into the details, but just for you to know that we keep on trying to refine the design of this half of a good house instead of a small one.  So President of the country opening the houses was two Fridays ago.  So we went on Monday to look to take pictures.  Here's the Trump poll is that concrete mixer.  So already there's this dynamics of adding over the weekend.  This is a wood structure.  So the mixer, the concrete mixer is mainly for the floor.  This one.  Yes.  Well, it's yes and no.  What we have learned is that it's not they building the thing themselves with their hands.  It's that if you identify that within the community, there are people that know about the construction sector, you meet with them and teach them how it is more efficient to do there.  It is very intuitive in the sense that this is three meters for some example and would it so sell in Chile in 3.2. So you just cut the edges and then can feed without losing material.  So there's an efficient way to provide that.  And what they do is they sell for normally between one sixth and one seventh of the initial cost of the first half of the house, the second half.  So it's a product, a group of workers sell to other families because they're not doing structural work that is complex.  They're just enclosing space.  That's the reason why the cost is several times less than the initial half.  So again, in poor communities, it's not that the poor do not have money.  They do not have in the form of a monthly income, but when they know they're going to get a property that is formal, they began to save when they knew that they were going to get in the house.  And that was it. Thank you so much.  I'm sorry, I know it was rather long, but if you still have some energy, I'm happy to answer a couple of questions or otherwise over the drinks.  Yeah, let's take a few questions. First of all, thank you for your lecture.  It was amazing to see the broad spectrum of what you're doing.  I'm extremely interested in the statement you made about deploying design as a mitigator in complex processes in order to resolve, let's say, contradicting,  interests, and you have always interests and you have always power at playing between these parties.  And this is where design suddenly becomes an actor like the participants themselves.  And you, as the architect, you're basically designing that actor on the run,  because I assume the project is constantly changing in order to promote dialogue between the various parties.  What interests me in that aspect is if you frame this in view of your first part of the lecture where you showed your work that you do in Chile and your work you do internationally.  I assume in Chile you were probably, since you know the customs and you know how, you know the language, you know how to behave at participatory meetings,  when you delocalize your practice into Texas, Europe, Russia now, you're facing entirely different cultural conditions that make it probably more difficult  for you as a delocalized practitioner to deploy design as an actor in trying to resolve local problems.  So I would be interested in this relationship.  Yeah, it's absolutely true and crucial what you're mentioning.  So let me start by saying that the provisional title of the approach, if there's any power in architecture, if there's any power in design, that's the power of synthesis.  By that I mean that when entering complex problems, and maybe there's no one single architectural project that is not complex,  but there are other that it might be even more charged like social housing or city design, even iconic buildings within the city.  That complexity, if faced while trying to understand the different agendas, might not be solved ever.  Actually, I will not mention a very important international company that works as a consultant, urban consultant or building consultant.  Actually, the word consultant is the problem.  You should be an author.  In Spanish it works because consultor y no autor.  So it even has the same sounding, but the difference between being a consultant and an author or taking the risk of making a proposal is that the paper of this big company started by having 72 80 pages of disclaimers of what they should not be blamed for.  Design by having at its very core this synthetic tool, which is design and the project, organizes information in a proposal key.  The biggest difference is that you're not stuck in at least diagnosis, but you jump directly into the void of making a proposal and all that energy and all that conversation, even the disagreements around something that is out there as a proposal.  You then may change may iterate main main modify the thing, but you're talking about a proposal, not disclaimers, not not even the information that then will allow the client to make the decision.  You make the decision and eventually if you know what you're talking about and you're confident about your skills, then you're open to receive those comments.  The more closer you are to this non written loss that you're mentioning of being close to Chile where you can interpret better body language and what is being said but what is not really meant and all that.  It might make it easier or at least faster, but nevertheless, what I think has proved to be crucial in any of this context is the capacity of architecture and design to organize a conversation around a proposal.  That was the case in Texas where we as soon as we could where they're trying to be as concrete as possible, it's okay because if we start by trying to understand the world vision of Republicans and Democrats or why some people wanted more decoration in the building  and more or looking the building as the original buildings, the older buildings, which by the way, where in where built in 1904 inspired in German architecture, Southern German architecture with pitched roofs for the snow in a context like Texas where it never snows.  But nevertheless, we thought it was, it made it was nonsense to try to mimic that, but we wanted to understand. Okay, what are you looking after when you're demanding more decorate decoration.  What is it that you like in old architecture without going too fast into the abstract box that is going to be published and it's going to look cool and but not does not take into consideration people's sensibilities and character and preferences.  So, instead of having endless conversations about culture or aesthetics. What are we talking about what you want in the end the conversation was, are we going to have a red roof or not.  This was the fine the ultimate discussion was about the red roof. With red roof, they thought it looked like a building without the red roof. They thought it looked like a rock or something like that.  And that very concrete conversation is something yet that you can have because in front of you you have that synthetic object which is the design and this has been proved to be extremely healthy as a way to enter this full of friction processes.  No matter you are eventually at the beginning less able to read the nonverbal clues.  That's one thing.  The other thing with is what I would say and this has been the case particularly for for social housing. When you reduce your answer to such irreducible core when you have taken out everything that is not absolutely necessary because there's no money to do otherwise.  People are not that different everywhere in the world. So what we need in the end is pretty much the same thing. This is a Marguerite Jursenar in the Adriano's memoir where she says that a stair, a comfortable stair is comfortable today.  And 2000 years ago for the Romans because we still have the same toes, the same feet actually. So I guess that that same universal, I don't know how to call it.  I mean what we in the end need as a more basic core of relationships and physical need and it's rather pretty much the same everywhere and nuances and differences tend to happen anyhow in the second half of the house.  We're not able not even for cultural distance. We're not even able to know family preferences and tastes the way they finish their houses. I mean, it is never the way we thought it would have happened.  So by what I meant by when saying that scarcity as a tool for inclusion by not having enough money, we were forced to create an open system that allowed people to move in with their own preferences.  And that tend which is the most difficult part where what it's hard to have to find an agreement that tends to happen anyhow.  If what you're focusing on is the most irreducible core because that I think tends to be rather universal.  Hello. It was a real pleasure to hear you obviously. Old friends I really admire what you've been doing because those of us who come from South America understand that the scarcity that he's being confronted with is our daily bread in Latin America.  To get anything built is a huge struggle and there's never enough funds. And when he was telling us about the value of a house decreasing over time, he told one story which was it's in a bad neighborhood.  It's badly built. It deteriorates. But there's another story, hyperinflation. Chile also went through some moments of inflation not now as it's grown to $20,000 per capita.  Venezuela Caracas, Venezuela was $20,000 per capita in 1958. So you can imagine what that was for Venezuela. And now it's down to about $7,000 per capita on oil producing country.  So this fluctuation gives you the framework which he's not, he began to show you the political framework, but gives you the framework of how it is difficult to become in work as an architect in Latin America, different from Europe.  And this global and local idea is interesting and I'm going to touch on that. One of the most striking things Alejandro, I find in your work is the simplicity with which you work out some econometrics.  You can use the econometrics of half a house or how with $7,000 you can produce a unit that's 30 square meters. So you boil it down to an economic idea, showing the forest and how much it would cost to expropriate.  Tell me a little bit more about that relationship between economy and design.  Okay, let me start by the scarcity thing, which I think is crucial. I feel, and this is not really a politically correct statement, I feel really privileged to have been educated in a country like Chile, whereas scarcity was the case because if anything,  scarcity, it's a great filter against arbitrariness. You cannot do whatever you want, your personal artistic agenda or your view of the world that is so fantastic that somebody has to finance and put a building out there so that we can all share this innovation.  You're forced to answer with what is strictly the case and one of the worst threats and risks of our profession and the way at least still we're very much educated in the world, maybe not here, which is a technical school, but that in definitely in our schools, which is the case for the majority of the architecture schools in the world.  The scarcity or the other whiceness, the arbitrariness that things can be this way or the other way, it's always the biggest risk of being irrelevant. The highest price that we as architects are paying normally is irrelevance.  We are not called to debate major issues. By having been trained in scarcity, you are within your muscles, your designer muscles, you answer with one nail, one hammer, one hit. That's it. You miss it, you don't have a second chance.  And this is fantastic because to answer with what is the case in social housing, as I said, is not a choice, but it's highly desirable when you're working in projects with much more budget.  The local global thing, again, when working for Novartis, where there was never a discussion about the budget, we still wanted to answer with an irreducible approach. And this is something that you carry on with you from having been trained under scarcity of means.  What you carry the other way around, and this is very important going to the question of design, we are trying to enter in these issues, poverty, resentment, violence, development or under development as designers.  We're not there as politicians or policymakers or writing paper, we want to do things. Actually, Elemental is called a do tank, as opposed to a think tank. Let's do something. And hopefully you change the conditions and the conditions are not good.  But in the meantime, within the set of constraints, do something because definitely it can be improved. And for that improvement to happen, you need design being done at its most cutting edge.  And that kind of skills are trained if you're dealing with projects that require high design standards like a Novartis building.  So the trade off is that from high budget, highly sophisticated project, you bring your designer tools from social housing and scarcity and political projects, you bring the scarcity as a filter against arbitrariness.  I guess that ultimately, relationship between economy or economics and design is that you're able to translate these non architectural issues into form.  No question.  No, but one thing.  I know this. No, no, no question. And then it can't.  I think that I when you mentioned about that the form had to be pertinent. And no, you're going to help me because I don't know if I can say that in English, but I mean the pertinence is something that agree or that understand exactly the goal.  And that is it fit in the budget in the requirement and everything.  So the answer, I think that has to be pertinent, but the architect not, you know, I think that the architect should not.  Yeah, not pertinent. Yeah.  I mean, as a person and I think that you act a lot like this, your answer are very pertinent, but as I mean, not pertinent, just to not be misunderstood is not to to agree with the world like it is right now, you know, and that's what I meant by saying that there are.  I mean, one can see these things as equations.  And actually, there are sometimes presented as if they're equations, but not because we believe this is a science, not even because we have a method or or or an ideology of how to approach the thing.  The only interesting and useful thing about framing it as an equation is that at least you know the terms that you have to deal with, even with if some of those terms are not speakable.  I mean, you just know the thing.  It's this unspeakable certainties and even is sometimes being pertinent means to answer with something that was not contained in the set of constraints.  It's about balancing, I guess, being reasonable, common sense, because you want to build the thing you you are realistic.  I mean, you're not dreaming awake.  But there's some boldness required.  There's some.  The answer is not necessarily contained in the existing conditions.  If it was, then eventually you're not being pertinent because you're just solving something and a proposal is different different from a solution.  It's not the same thing.  You are bringing the thing to the next level, but that next level has to be far away enough so that is a potential of the things that but not that far away.  That is completely disconnected, not also too close because otherwise you may not have tackled the real unspoken problem of not having had a coordination previously.  So that's why for us, it's it's very hard to teach, for example, nobody nobody's teaching in the office because it requires to be much more clear than we are.  We may know some things, but we're we have really problems trying to speak about those things.  We just know some of them.  And so I guess the do tongue thing, it's very crucial in our approach and more clarity about this.  It's it's hard.  I mean, I guess I'm touching the limit of how far I can go in in opening the thing without being too obscure.  You can imagine I had to respond to the do tank versus think tank.  I just want to say that I have to debate a little more.  I think it's really interesting the pertinence of this idea that a built work is the only significant thing.  And that and I want to get into that more.  I think about Super Studio.  I think even about your equation of half a house, whether that is really a built thing or that is actually a conceptual thing.  I think about the fund palace by Cedric Price.  I think about some arctic grams ideas of walking city.  And I start to think whether it is necessary to build or a project can be also an equation.  A text by John Turner, for instance, or or can be something else.  And you ended on your book, of course, or in one of the moments close to the end of the project section.  So a book can be a project too.  So I want to debate a little more on why you believe so hardly the architects must intervene physically.  Yeah, no, I to be honest, I didn't I wasn't having it here in this part of my attention, the urban think tank.  The truth and the reason why it's important for me, the do tongue has to be measured against where it started at Harvard in 2000,  where teaching a social housing studio was the least cool thing you could ever think about ever.  I mean, it was just just not cool to do social housing is that but everywhere, even Chile.  I arrive at Harvard not knowing what a subsidy was.  So it's not just for the others myself, never had any contact in it with the public world in a country where 60% of what's being built uses some kind of subsidy.  I had no idea what a subsidy was.  So out of self embarrassment, I decided that I may should do something with this.  Actually, it's not even true.  Somebody, a partner, a transport engineer that made the right questions and allowed me to go into the world that I had no the right tools because I was trained differently in an architecture school.  What it made me nervous though, and that was the title of the first studio I taught at Harvard, this other wiseness thing with arbitrariness is that.  And this was my my partners approach.  He was complied about his at you architects, including me.  When you're entering a field.  And the possible outcome begins to be or has have a risk or there's some kind of threat that is not going to look right.  Then you change the question.  So you begin to accommodate the information so that your final result, it's clean, cool, it still can make it to the magazines and be published.  The reaction was against that cleanness.  Cool environment of projects that might be fantastic on paper, but never were willing to walk the talk and see what will happen to them if they tried to get built.  And the main thing was to develop a new skin so that we are we're comfortable with the gray areas with things that were ugly, not not eventually the perfect.  But it was good perfection is the enemy of good.  And so try to develop can we survive with if we're judged within the architectural world.  It was very crucial to have an engineer partner because when we met and he said, why don't we do something with social housing.  For me in my architects mind do something meant a seminar, an exhibition, publication, a workshop for him do something meant let's build the company and go out there and build 100 units at least.  Otherwise, we're not if we have eventually have a point.  Nobody will believe us.  So in order to go for that, we had to abandon, let's say the way of measuring our practice.  And the reason of course you have to imagine what does it mean to and I was saying but look in social housing it's it.  We're not going to make it to a cookies we're not going to make it to the Pritzker prize and he was looking at me.  The Pritzker what for he Pritzker prize couldn't care less.  I mean, for his mind, he said, look, I prefer a hundred lines in the economist than a hundred pages in a crocus because there you may eventually notice early change things that matter.  So the do tank thing is was a reaction of trying ourselves to change who was going to listen to us we were going to talk to and eventually what our outcome was going to look like knowing that it was a lost battle if we were to try to be judged within the  cultural community and and and this is why it became a for profit company.  The complete different mindset that again, I still today don't know how it works.  I mean, I cannot open Excel sheet.  But then the thing is that you don't you don't have to learn all these things.  You just have to partner with somebody that does.  Questions from from the students.  Yeah.  So I'm curious as a future potential planner, I'm curious about how do you find your position in such project that's that that you in which you struggle between the powers of government and citizens and different stakeholders.  Are you more like a dictator or are you more like a democratic in a democratic environment for discussion.  It's an interesting question.  And again, I maybe the reason why we enter these fields is because we have no idea if we knew we wouldn't enter.  I mean, the amount of things that you have to go through.  There's so much that it may be ignorance. It's the only way to be able to have the courage to enter the thing.  But intuition at the beginning and now it's more conscious.  A few things.  First, do not identify the one that pays your check with the one that you're reporting to Chilean copper corporation is hiring us.  Clearly said, before anybody, politicians, community, other companies, but yes, we're being paid and hopefully very well because this is a tough question.  We're going to have to spend quality time in here and we want to be paid well because this is extremely difficult.  So this is the first thing.  Clarify that it is not voluntary work. I mean, these issues are so difficult that they require professional quality, not professional charity.  So volunteer work will never answer difficult questions. Sorry.  I mean, it requires professional quality, not professional charity.  Once that is said, condition, okay, you're paying my check, but I'm reporting to somebody that is bigger than you.  So you heard in the reconstruction after the earthquake, it was the same case for all the other big projects that we're dealing with.  First thing, have a client, a counterpart that is bigger than the one paying your check.  Government, municipality, plus a company, if it's the case of a company, plus the community.  So empower community because they have to be there.  Not just for a democratic approach, which is, I think it's nice.  It's okay to be as democratic as possible.  But besides this kind of good intentions, there's a very practical reason.  Changes in cities happen in periods of time that are much longer than political times.  Administrations, a presidency lasts four years, a mayor four years, until a president cannot be re-elected.  So you know it's four years.  Eventually a mayor can be re-elected, but not necessarily clear.  And changes, significant changes in cities happen over periods of time, of decades.  If you have community taking part as a client, they are the only ones that are going to be there during the next mayor,  during the next minister, during the next president.  So that client that we are reporting to has at least other institutions that were created to, at least in principle,  take care of public good, governments, the state, the municipality, they are there for the public good.  There's a problem with, if you only work with the government, at least in the case of the Chilean situation,  being a relatively poor country, the only way you can justify investment in different projects is that if you're overcoming a deficit.  If you want to go beyond the deficit, there's not money.  And all the problems that we are facing in a $20,000 economy is not about basic needs, it's not about deficits.  We already achieved that. The new problems are much more complex.  People are demanding beautiful cities, quality of life.  I mean, you see the complaints that it's not about having water switched.  I mean, it's the next generation of problems, and the state architecture is only prepared to overcome a deficit.  If you have private companies inside the client, well, they're designed to create profit.  I mean, they have something to gain. They frame the information in the form that they are going to move to the next phase.  Just remaining even is not enough for a company.  So each of the stakeholders, and this is the reason why we are creating these consortiums,  has something to put into which is a good thing and some bad thing that is controlled by the other one.  So I guess that once you're there having public, private community, and you place yourself in the center,  again, this car's resource there is going to be synthesis.  And the only way to establish a communication once you have designed your own client is to be able to organize all that information  on a proposal key, and I go back to the previous question.  Thanks for the speech, and your solution is really interesting.  And you actually allow, leave space and allow individual families to build the second half of their house.  I just wonder whether it is possible for the families to rent the second half out to others after the construction  or invite other family members to live with them.  If so, that means an increase to the population, and it will cause great pressure to the public facilities  such as roads, water supply, and the schools and others, which I suppose should be provided according to the original population.  So I just wonder what do you think of this problem during your design? Thank you.  I think it's a good question, and it goes back to individual freedom.  There are some things that you can't coordinate, centralized as a government, even as a company.  There are some things that you cannot control, and you have to be okay not to be able to control.  If you're creating an open system, you're not just opening space for different aesthetic preferences.  You're opening the creation of space for different family structure, different economical needs.  The experiences that we have had is that there are people that immediately bring relatives to live with them because there's the need.  Others need a shop at home.  A guy with a taxi needs to park the taxi inside the house.  Otherwise, the next morning, it's not going to be there.  Other people have animals, other people have a lot of children, other people are old and don't need more space,  but need that outdoor ground floor accessibility.  It's so hard to respond with one single design to that that only if you're creating a system that is open enough,  then you're going to be able to accommodate such diversity.  If people want to go against their own good, what can I say?  I mean, it's up to them.  Do you have any control of the entire plan of system from ratios or the area of the plan?  Well, in theory, yes. In practice, no.  There's a rule.  I mean, the second very practical thing.  We have entered the design to the municipality building department as a final stage.  And they said, okay, we're delivering just the first phase,  but the second phase is already approved from the municipality.  So the families, in theory, are only allowed to build that second half because that's what's legal.  But if they don't do that, it's up to them.  But what do we do? Knowing that even if they might want or have the intention to do that,  they might have lost their plans or they were coming to the meetings and saying,  yeah, here you put a wall, here you put a window, and they're saying like that,  and they go out of the meeting and they had no clue you were talking about.  They don't know how to read a plan, for example. It can happen.  So what we do is to follow what we call the minimum effort law.  Let's design, prepare for what is going to be faster, cheaper, and easier to do.  If you want to stick out of the facade, you can do that eventually, but it's more costly.  It is faster, cheaper, easier to make a beam from A to B.  We know that, they know that, and even if they forgot the plans or lost them,  when they go to buy a beam, look at the space, measure the thing,  the easiest way to connect A to B is the same way the design was thought and anticipated.  So I guess that the minimum effort law is something that is quite strong.  I would say it's another way to call it, it's common sense.  Thank you very much for your talk, and it is really fascinating as you show that you are really able to participate  in different phases of the design process and to talk to so many different stakeholders.  For me, it's also interesting to see that you're able to work in different fields of operations,  different scales, and this is where I tried to fit my question in,  and you also showed many landscape projects, a project where you design open public space,  the one with the funicular on the slope, the deprimonade, and the one on this park on the ground zero.  I would say landscape architectural projects per se are characterized by different conditions.  The notion of public and private space, space ownership, in most cases you design a process, not a product, etc.  So also the public participation processes are kind of modified.  So does your project philosophy scheme you showed, you told us this is not a recipe, this is not a guideline,  but does it heavily change when you do landscape architectural projects, or let me put my question in another term,  is it possible to design half of a good landscape, not only half of a good house?  It's a good question. We have thought the same thing about infrastructure.  We have thought about designing half of a good city, and not the entire city,  because if you channel properly the forces that are around cities, you know, economical forces, legal forces, environmental forces, social,  eventually if that first half has been correctly or intuitively read, you may do so.  I have to start answering by maybe one step backwards.  When we have the X in the center of this cloud that we're trying to understand that will be informed,  is it not only about the form, sometimes it's about what to do.  What this community will require a park or a public or infrastructure will be the solution for this project,  be a building or be, eventually the conclusion is that you know what, they need just better professors and teachers,  and it's not our realm, and let's ask another consultant for bringing better professors.  What to do in the first place? It's the kind of questions that we have to be open to.  It was not there because it's a very recent thing. Actually, while I'm traveling here, part of the partners of the office are in Peru,  having conversations with a mining company.  They fabricate pipes and tubes. They're going to invest or need to invest an incredible amount of money with a community that already blocked  a $10 billion investment because they did not follow the right approach or whatever.  So they decided, okay, one step back.  I think that before even thinking of how we're going to operate, we need to establish some relationship with this community,  but we don't know how. We have pipes and they said, what if we make a moving park?  A park that we can transport from one place to another because if there's anything that we know how to do, it's logistics.  They're very good in logistics, but there's mainly about delivering goods.  Could it be that we would deliver and use our logistics skills in delivering urban quality of life?  So we thought that this was to do a moving park. I have no idea what it's going to look like.  Is it going to be moved with trucks or with trains? I don't know.  But it goes back to maybe the park is just the children playground.  It's not about the greenery of the thing.  So I guess that we spent a lot of time when I say trying to understand the right question and not answering well the wrong question.  Well, if you two immediately jump into a park equal landscape, we might be answering well the wrong question.  And when we are open also that is if as a conclusion of that process, the job was not for us.  Fine.  Great. Thank you very much, Alex Alejandro for coming to Zurich and let's continue the discussion with the glass of wine.  Thanks a lot.
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