Watching : Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s Lecture

This blog is a reading around the lecture by Pezo von Ellrichshausen (An art architecture studio founded in 2002 by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia Von Ellrichshausen. They live and work in Southern Chilean city of Concepcion) This lecture was  recorded on February 15, 2016 in Columbia GSAAP.

I am conscious and aware the of the value of a good lecture watched online, especially a  thought provoking like the one here. My exposure of listening to people who are involved in architecture (academics and practice) outside my college in Mysore was very limited. I remember the first lecture I heard was in third year when I went to student event in Belgaum. My access to video lectures happened in a very minimal way only in the last 2 years of the undergraduate program. A habit very helpful in the exposure to ideas till today. With the ubiquity of the information available, I have a substantial regard for these online lectures. They are wonderful pockets of knowledge. Like this lecture by Pezo Von Ellrichshausen. I was drawn to their work for their crisp drawings and clean aesthetics. Especially the ‘sliced axonometric’. I was showing them as references for students. Even the plans and sections have impeccable clarity. So I was curious to know their process. The drawings always reveal the intention of the process. Prof. Doshi used to say in the design studio at CEPT, that one could sense the personality of the student by the way he or she draws.

It was liberating to hear them talk about how only few fundamental things informs their design. The keyword here is a ‘self referential’ object. Initially I assumed them to be European, as they have a rational clean-box approach. This practice is based in Chile, a developing country like us. Not to say that this clean-box aesthetics belongs only to developed countries. But the lecture throws a very different perspective. There are internal spatial rules, which informs the formation of space in their practice. This process does not borrow any other clues (context, landscape, etc) till a very late stage and only if needed. I find this very provocative in a subdued way. It has become a norm to place  architecture inside the narratives of social, political and cultural contexts, which are also very crucial. But it sometimes fail to inform the fundamentals of space making. I admired their approach to keep the process fundamental and focussed, which is very difficult. In their monograph ‘Naive Intentions’ they mention “We do not only believe that there is no possible work of art without an institutionalized system that validates it but also that only a small percentage of that work has the real scope to interrogate the very institution that defines it”