The selection of Aravena codifies the direction in which the Prize jury first feinted with the selection of Shigeru Ban in 2014—a direction, it must be noted, in which Aravena played a part as a juror. As I said in a Critics' Roundtable for Architect magazine at that time, "I [didn't] think Ban would have won just for the refugee housing, a system to be packed up and redeployed. What he did was make cardboard architecture that looks, at least in pictures, as beautiful as permanent architecture, and because of that will probably be made permanent." I also tweeted, "Next year's winner, Southern Hemisphere. #Pritzker." (Hey, I was only a year off.)

Ban allowed the Pritzker jury to move the narrative forward, putting behind them—at least for a moment—the brouhaha surrounding the petition to retroactively award Denise Scott Brown a share of partner and husband Robert Venturi's prize. Ban is a man, who headlines his own practice, from Japan (which has seven laureates), so the shift is seen in his best-known works: the cardboard tube shelters, community centers, and even cathedrals he developed for post-disaster sites. It's hard to argue that that's not architecture worth awarding in the unsettled weather of the 21st century.

Ban, like Aravena, is part of a younger generation of modernist architects in a country with a strong design lineage. His interest in design for the other 99 percent is perfectly of the moment. But Ban's architecture, like Aravena's, also explicitly refers to the work of Western architectural history. For Ban I listed Alvar Aalto, Buckminster Fuller, and Frei Otto (coincidentally, the posthumous Pritzker Prize laureate in 2015). For Aravena I would list Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. The work is easy on the eyes as well as comfort for the soul. If I may be allowed a comment on the appearance of a male architect, I see a parallel in the care taken that Aravena's hair is rumpled just so, in every photo, while he typically sports the wrinkled, rolled-sleeve linen shirt of pragmatism.

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The idea of house as platform was (and is) irresistible, particularly from the perspective of American social housing, where families cram into one-bedrooms, and the elderly are lonely in three. Aravena's basic framework, rapidly filled in with a motley array of materials and decorative detailing, can also remind one of the way balconies on postwar projects are often enclosed to serve as strangely public closets. The concept clearly bears a debt to Le Corbusier's Dom-ino House system, concrete platforms held up by columns, and like that system, leaves room for personal expression. Aravena likes to talk about participatory architecture, and Quinta Monroy (as well as the additional 2,400 units of social housing ELEMENTAL has subsequently designed) is a most elegant illustration of the point. As he said in his 2014 TED Talk in Rio: "None of this is rocket science. It's not about technology but archaic, primitive common sense."

Since Quinta Monroy, Aravena has become part of the international architectural establishment. He was a member of the Pritzker jury from 2009 to 2015 (he, Ban, and Fumihiko Maki are the three jurors to have won the prize after their service), he's director of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016, he's given a TED Talk, and he's been exhibited at MoMA. Which is not to take away from the work, but to say: He's only a surprise if you really thought more white male neo-modernists from the East Coast were going to be Pritzkered right now.

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Much discussion of design today seems to ignore the physical—Uber says it is a technology company, while delivery reality for virtual-farmers-market Good Eggs is doomed by LA traffic. Founders forget there are heavy objects and individual people who must be moved and protected.

Aravena's work takes the opposite approach, grounding itself in participatory process, local materials, and the simplicity that comes from an understanding of what will actually work. When he talks about saving Chilean coastal cities, it is with forests—to provide friction—not sensors or high walls. He understands that it isn't just a cheap house, but a cheap house in a good location that constitutes quality of living.

This is refreshing, ...