Sofia von Ellrichshausen and Mauricio Pezo founded Pezo von Ellrichshausen in the southern Chilean city of Concepción in 2002. The two believe that architecture is a form of knowledge that provides “a tool to experience, read, and eventually understand the world in which we live.” They describe the sequence of design tools and methods that guide their work: “reading buildings by their ‘spatial structure’; replacing the notion of form by ‘format’; articulating rooms without interior; eroding the scale of things; doing austere buildings, hundreds of paintings, over and over again, ‘no more no less’.”

For their Current Work lecture, Pezo and von Ellrichshausen will discuss several projects in Chile and beyond, including:

• Rode house in Chiloe Island, Chile, a curved, asymmetrical, unusual-shaped structure with a pitched roof built entirely of local timber.
• Vara Pavilion, a labyrinthine structure made of ten overlapping cylinders of different sizes built for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.
• Cien house, a monolithic concrete tower that serves as the duo’s house and studio in Concepción, Chile.

Sofia von Ellrichshausen received a degree in architecture from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Mauricio Pezo holds an MArch from the Universidad Catolica de Chile and an architecture degree from the Universidad del Bio-Bio. He has been awarded the Young Architect Prize by the Chilean Architects Association. 

The studio is a recipient of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Emerge Prize, the Rice Design Alliance Prize, the Iberoamerican Architecture Biennial Award, and the Chilean Architecture Award. Pezo and von Ellrichshausen were the curators of the Chilean Pavilion in the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale.

A conversation with Michael Meredith will follow the lecture. Meredith is a principal of MOS, a New York-based architecture office, and an associate professor and director of graduate studies at Princeton University School of Architecture.

Support

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

The event is co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.