Alejandro Aravena, Santa Sofía de Lo Cañas, La Florida, Santiago, Chile, 1997
OfHouses presents “Pritzkers’ First Houses”: The first in the retrospective look over the first houses built by the winners of the Pritzker Prize is Alejandro Aravena Mori’s (Pritzker 2016) house designed for the sculptor Francisca Cerda in 1997. According to Justin McGuirk’s article in Icon Magazine, Aravena’s first residential commission came at the right time for the 30 year old architect: Shortly after graduating in the early 1990s, following a succession of
“shitty clients … restaurants, bars, shops”, he got so disillusioned
that he quit architecture and opened a bar. “I lived by night, waking up
at 5pm and going to bed at 10am,” he says. When he eventually decided
to resume his career, he got lucky. A sculptor asked him to design her
house (…). “I wanted to have that
kind of freedom,” he recalls, “so I said, ‘Don’t pay me, but allow me to
do whatever I want.’ I think I was rigorous enough, but it was still a
completely stupid thing.” Elemental ’s website doesn’t cover this project anymore. We don’t know if it’s because of the shitty pictures (taken by Aravena himself) or because the project simply doesn’t fit anymore in a chronology of works that now officially debuts with the more socially responsible (and equally exotic) design for a high school on Easter Island. (Photos: © Alejandro Aravena. Source: Via Arquitectura 11/2002, pp 88-91.)
