ALEJANDRO HAIEK spoke to the Morning Star before delivering a lecture to a packed audience at the Bolivar Hall in London.

Earlier in the day, he’d given a lengthy interview to the Architectural Association and after London it was to be Harvard University’s turn.

You’d expect all this attention to be hugely demanding but for Haiek it’s a welcome mission, an opportunity to spread a message that’s well worth listening to.

One thing that’s immediately striking about the slightly built, wiry architect is his infectious enthusiasm for the highly unorthodox ideas about his profession he espouses.

Haiek and his collaborators lead Lab.Pro.Fab., a “laboratory” for projects and building, which is an architectural practice with a significant difference. Their projects are entirely community led and so are their design responses, which are consultative every step of the way.

Yet this is no design by committee. There is one word, says Haiek, that’s at the centre of their approach — recycling. It applies to communities with their treasure trove of skills, underused or abandoned urban space, discarded building detritus and, crucially, “human aspirations that have been forsaken or ignored.”

Together, these elements form a “new collective dynamic of shared purpose and its realisation that does actually change lives — irreversibly for the better — and also, tellingly, the urban landscape itself.”

Nothing’s ever built before the empowering structures are in place, he stresses. “We need to socialise knowledge, pool local skills, create sustainable jobs, respond to local consultative assemblies and create a new model for social production by changing the social cartography, where horizontal, moderating structures become the dominant norm.”

It is in many ways reminiscent of the “slow movement” in architecture, one of progressive self-discovery and affirmation.

The architect is fond of quoting an elderly metalworker who, while working out the problems faced when installing circular windows for the Tiuna el Fuerte cultural park in Caracas, poignantly confessed that all his life his hands ached from hard work “but now it is my head that aches.”

Haiek’s work is a principled demolition of the ivory-tower mentality and ego-tripping so prevalent within contemporary Western architecture and is deservedly lauded.

Lab.Pro.Fab. has been repeatedly recognised internationally, most notably at the Barcelona biennale of architecture for Tiuna el Fuerte. A work in progress at Tiuna el Fuerte at the intersection of two motorways, it has over the last decade become an all-important hub of cultural, educational and recreational activities for the neighbourhood and beyond. It even owns a busy and competitively priced commercial recording studio slotted neatly into the local economy.

Constructed with donated containers, it epitomises Haiek’s strategies of subversion, confrontation and extrication of spaces along the fault lines of the system.

“Hybridise, miscegenise and experiment to change oppressive legal frameworks, find new technologies,” is what it is all about and the ultimate aim is to “revolutionise the revolution.”

A spectacular example of that mission statement is the “Programmatic Platform” in the Lomas de Urdaneta neighbourhood in the Venezuelan capital which includes a sports hall, a cafeteria and a meeting/educational space.

It hangs in the air like a space ship that may well have arrived from another world and, at night, its majestic luminosity has the wow factor to end them all.

A vindication of the Lab.Pro.Fab. approach it has, says Haiek, become a focus of local pride. He smiles as he tells me that when the platform was finished “the local families faced a serious problem when kids started to bunk off school to spend all their time there.”

It is this power to restore dignity and self-worth, whatever the daily privations, that is ultimately the most impressive thing about Haiek’s projects; to cite Baudelaire, it’s all about the “enrichment of the self.”

I ask Haiek about the ramifications of this year’s Pritzker prize — a kind of Nobel for architecture — being awarded to his Chilean namesake Alejandro Aravena.

He acknowledges Aravena’s preference for working with local communities and his pioneering impact on housing but believes it is “the ordinary people involved in these initiatives who deserve most of the recognition.

“To just reward aesthetics is to miss the whole point given that 90 per cent of world architecture is informal,” he stresses.

For him “architecture is just the ground, everything else is of and comes from the people.”

In Venezuela today ordinary people face an onslaught on their rights by socially and politically retrograde forces that no doubt aim to punish their Bolivarian “insolence” in daring to shape their destinies free from tyrannical diktat.

Haiek remains upbeat and clings to the notion that “a unity of purpose may yet bring together disparate political forces in the name of greater good.”

History may not be on his side but there is no denying his honesty and single-minded perseverance, which will surely allow Lab.Pro.Fab. to flourish in whatever configuration is necessary in the future.