Alejandro Aravena, creator of low-cost homes, wins Pritzker Prize

A 48-year-old Chilean architect with a passion for creating low-cost homes has won his profession’s highest honor, the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Unlike prior winners such as Rem Koolhaas or Lord Norman Foster, both of whom practice at sky-scraping global scale (and whose firms both have towers in the works in San Francisco), nearly all of Aravena’s work has been in Chile.

What caught the eye of the Pritzker jury — a disparate eight-member group that includes two former winners and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer — is Aravena’s focus on a challenge faced around the world: housing people who were drawn to cities by the quest for jobs and better lives.

Alejandro Aravena epitomizes the revival of a more socially engaged architect, especially in his long-term commitment to tackling the global housing crisis and fighting for a better urban environment for all,” reads the jury citation, which also praises Aravena for having “consistently pursued architecture with a clarity of vision and great skill.

In a telephone interview with The Chronicle, Aravena emphasized that housing for low-income families must provide more than four walls and a roof.

Architecturally, Aravena’s housing tends to be dense but domestic, with tightly packed homes rather than the multifamily structures associated with affordable housing in the Bay Area.

Elemental’s institutional buildings often have a massive sculptural aura, but that’s often for environmental reasons as well as aesthetic ones.

“Such an incredible space,” he said of the 1,017-acre green rectangle stretching from the Inner Sunset to the Pacific Ocean “Cities are measured by what you can do in them for free,” he said.