Alejandro Aravena: First Chilean Architect to Take Home the Pritzker Prize

"48-year old Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena has been awarded the 2016 Pritzker Prize," reports Alexandra Lange. "He's the first laureate from Chile, the third from South America, and the fourth from Latin America." [Emphasis is the author's.] 

Lange also describes Aravena as "a telegenic star of the international architecture scene, best-known for a housing complex built at a cost of $7,500 per unit and a proponent of 'the rigorous use of common sense' to create sustainable, affordable and resilient cities." Lange's coverage of the award includes discussion about the politics on display by the Pritzker Prize jury since the award went to Shigeru Ban in 2014. Lange sums up Avarena's approach to architecture as "design for the other 99 percent."

Reflecting the prestige of the award, there was a lot of additional coverage of the award on the day of the announcement:

• Anna Winston interviewed Aravena for Dezeen.
• Paul Goldberger provides his positive response to the selection for Vanity Fair.
• Blair Kamin discusses the message sent by the Pritzker jury to the architecture world at large: "The field of architecture, at least in the way it thinks, is shifting direction."

For more background on Aravena before the big award, Carolina A. Miranda rather presciently profiled the architect back in May 2015.