Alejandro Aravena, the winner of architecture's Pritzker Prize, has sparked a debate about how to best shelter the global poor.

Some point out more fundamental limitations of Aravena’s approach to incremental social housing. Isn’t asking the poor to shoulder more of the housing burden an inherently unfair proposition? In an article, Chilean architecture professor Fabian Barros asked whether Aravena’s approach “paradoxically reproduces what it tries to fight.” In his view, the provision of just half a house “produces inequality, as it considers the inhabitants of these homes as beings from another social class who can live in half-finished houses without privacy and in highly degraded environments.” At the Santiago, Chile, university where Aravena teaches, a group of students even constructed a shantytown installation called “Incremental” to protest the architect......Continue Reading

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