Back in Santiago, Aravena and his wife, Gica, who studied architecture in her native Brazil, took me one sunny afternoon to see the rusted steel and glass house they built for themselves and their two young daughters. (Aravena has a teenage son from a previous relationship.) It’s perched atop a little hill on a leafy street in Santiago. The house is near Elemental’s office, a scrappy suite of rooms for 20-odd employees that takes up half a floor in an aging commercial tower. A few blocks in the other direction is Aravena’s old architecture school at the Universidad Católica de Santiago.

We wandered over to see it. The school occupies a handsome colonial-era hacienda called Lo Contador. Back in the 1980s, “it was a competitive but collaborative atmosphere,” Aravena told me. These were the Pinochet years, so many foreign magazines were banned and Chilean architecture students had limited access to what was going on in the rest of the world. “We were saved from postmodernism,” Aravena says about the upside of censorship. “By default, we were left to find our own identity. Our professors were practitioners, not theorists, who taught how to get buildings built. It was, in retrospect, a very useful education.”

Aravena and his classmates graduated into post-dictatorship Chile, “not exactly as a close-knit group,” he recalls, “but united by what we were not — not postmodern, not parametric, not ideological. We were educated. We were steeped in art, math, literature and materials. We knew how to draw and to build.”

The courtyard of Lo Contador is a lush sprawl of trees and footpaths. Student projects and posters hung on peeling walls around the hacienda’s arcade. As always, Aravena carried a sketchbook. He draws all the time, to work out a plan, to illustrate a point. His conversation tends not toward architecture and aesthetics but toward practical affairs — negotiations, economics, materials, numbers — which for him can be a source of wonderment. He spent 10 minutes one day on a rapturous tangent about the odd number of stairs Michelangelo designed for the vestibule of the Laurentian Library in Florence.

“I feel I really began to study architecture when I moved to Venice in 1992,” he told me. “I was on a completely different planet there. I could go to a building for a week just to draw it. I spent a month drawing Doric temples in Sicily. I was measuring everything, absorbing all this history we didn’t learn in Chile. I saw Romanesque buildings and Palladio’s buildings and Alberti’s and Brunelleschi’s buildings, all of which finally made me realize what architecture could aspire to be.

“Then, when I came back to Chile, the jobs I got were for restaurants and shops, one lousy client after another. I was doing a discothèque in northern Chile for a guy who proved to be dishonest in the end, and finally couldn’t take it. It wasn’t what I had devoted my life to learning. So I quit architecture and opened a bar. I was still a nerd but I was living at night and sleeping in the day.” That lasted a couple of years, until a chance came up to design a new building for the mathematics department at the Catholic University’s San Joaquin campus.