Current Work | Pezo von Ellrichshausen: From A to B

Tuesday, September 10, 2019, 7 - 9pm

Add to Calendar

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.

This lecture is co-sponsored with The Architectural League of New York. Tickets are free for Cooper Union students and faculty with valid ID, and League members.

View the full Fall 2019 Lectures and Events List.

Located in The Great Hall, in the Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues

More Events & Exhibitions

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.