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2016 was a very good year for Alejandro Aravena, co-founder and face of the Chilean agency Elemental. Having been appointed director of the 2016 Venice architecture biennale, in January he was also awarded the Pritzker Prize, the youngest winner to date of a prize often seen as architecture’s equivalent to the Nobel. The two honours seem to herald a turn towards “social activist architecture”, with Aravena at the helm. They also foregrounded the half-house project which made his name. The system, inspired by similar designs from the 1960s, puts forward a solution to the growing housing crisis. But are they really as worthy as their designer claims? The article studies Elemental’s networks, the virtuoso public relations campaign conducted by its star architect, and the implications of the system to conclude that the half-houses in fact perfectly meet the needs of the neo-liberal market. It further concludes that so-called “socially responsible” architecture is in fact just another trick of the ever-intangible markets.