Pezo von Ellrichshausen

The almost invisible figure stands… as a simple equilateral triangle. A single opening, in its front, projects the visitor beyond its interior. The facade turns into a threshold: a gap of everyday life, a portrait of Seoul’s long forgotten blank, Songhyeon. The Pavilion becomes a space out of this world.

 

 

The thin, corridor-like space contains a pair of logs at each end. A theatrical stage, a charged void, obliges visitors to face an unavoidable encounter. Between whom? Perhaps a mother and child, strangers, or fictional faces: ideas ？ about nature, the future, or our human responsibilities. The pavilion then can be interpreted as the moment where Ethic returns to social life, as French philosopher Levinas puts it: the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation, opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation.

 

 

Pair Pavilion, as its name suggests, is meant to have two lives: a temporary one at Seoul Biennale, and a permanent afterlife at Medongaule Garden, an unprecedented Nietzsche-inspired botanical garden currently being developed in Yangpyeong. In the end, the pavilion itself will become a double portrait.

 

Sponsors: Medongaule Garden

 

 Pezo von Ellrichshausen is an art and architecture studio founded in 2002 by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen. They live and work in southern Chile, in a farm at the foot of the Andes Mountains. They are Professor of the Practice at AAP Cornell University and the current Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor at Yale University, and have also been Visiting Professors at the GSD Harvard University, the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, the Porto Academy and at the Universidad Catolica de Chile. Their work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the MAXXI in Rome and as part of the Permanent Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They have been invited to the Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition (2010, 2016), where they also were the curators for the Chilean Pavilion in 2008.

 

Pezo von Ellrichshausen/ Mauricio Pezo, Sofia von Ellrichshausen

Collaborators: Beatrice Pedrotti, Lukas Vajda

Local Architects: Simplex Architecture

Structural Engineer: Kwang-jae Yoon, GARAM Structural Engineering