Winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2016, the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena is also the founder and executive director of the ELEMENTAL studio, based in Santiago, Chile. During his prolific career, much of his work has focussed on public interest and social impact, devising projects that offer creative and unconventional architectural solutions to pressing housing, public space, and infrastructure issues in socially and economically challenging environments. In addition to serving as curator for the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, Aravena now chairs the jury for the Pritzker.

Over the last decade, african architecture has received deserved international attention, much of it focussed on Diébédo Francis Kéré. Originally born in the village of Gando, in Burkina Faso, he trained as an architect at the Technical University of Berlin. In 2022, Kéré received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, becoming the first african architect to do so.

Kengo Kuma is certainly one of the most recognised and expressive Japanese architects today. His (re)interpretations of traditional Japanese architecture include dynamic surfaces, innovative structures, the use of sustainable materials, an original way of thinking about the relationship between light and space…

After over a century in which concrete has become the go-to material in construction, cross-laminated timber has emerged as the most viable solution to make architecture and the building industry more sustainable.

“It’s the only way! If you think about it, a photograph is finished when it’s taken, a song is finished when it’s written, a sculpture is finished, a film is finished, but architecture waits. Because it’s a creative environment, it’s new space for occupants to come and fill it with the spirit it represents. Of course, architecture is always diplomatic and symbolic, and it’s mystical because it seems very abstract, straight lines, geometries and all those things.”