ELEMENTAL (Alejandro Aravena, Gonzalo Arteaga, Juan Cerda, Victor Oddó, Diego Torres) is a Do Tank founded in 2001, focusing on projects of public interest and social impact, including housing, public space, infrastructure and transportation. A hallmark of the firm is a participatory design process in which the architects work closely with the public and end users. ELEMENTAL has built work in Chile, The United States, Mexico, China and Switzerland. After the 2010 earthquake and tsunami that hit Chile, ELEMENTAL was called to work on the reconstruction of the city of Constitución, where we had to integrate all the previous experiences. The approach we developed proved to be useful for other cases where city design was used to solve social and political conflicts. At the moment, we keep on expanding into new fields of action.
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Alejandro Aravena was born on June 22, 1967, in Santiago, Chile. He graduated in Architecture from Universidad Católica de Chile in 1992. In 1991, still as a student, he participated at the Venice Prize of the 5th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia. In 1993 he studied History and Theory at IUAV and engraving at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. In 1994, he established his own practice, Alejandro Aravena Architects. From 2000 until 2005, he was professor at Harvard University, where he founded ELEMENTAL together with engineer Andres Iacobelli. From 2009 until 2015, he was member of the Pritzker Prize Jury. In 2010, he was named International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and identified as one of the 20 new heroes of the world by Monocle magazine. He is a Board Member of the London School of Economics Cities Program since 2011; Regional Advisory Board Member of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; Board Member of the Swiss Holcim Foundation since 2013; Foundational Member of the Chilean Public Policies Society; Leader of the Helsinki Design Lab for SITRA, the Finnish Government Innovation Fund. He was one of the 100 personalities contributing to the Rio +20 Global Summit in 2012. He was a speaker at TED Global Rio in 2014.
He was appointed Director of the 15th Intl. Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2016).
He has been leading ELEMENTAL since 2001.

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Alejandro Aravena is author of Los Hechos de la Arquitectura (Architectural Facts, 1999), El Lugar de la Arquitectura (The Place in/of Architecture, 2002) and Material de Arquitectura (Architecture Matters, 2003). His work has been published in over 50 countries, Electa published the monography Alejandro Aravena; progettare e costruire (Milan, 2007) and Toto published Alejandro Aravena; the Forces in Architecture (Tokyo, 2011).