LIGA 01: Pezo von Ellrichshausen (Chile). No More, No Less
Photography: Ramiro Chaves
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll.
When architects conceptualize the space in which they will show their work, they have to make a base scheme for the reading of this space, where words and things are constructed at the same time—a museum of twelve rooms around an invisible, apparently neutral square. But let’s not kid ourselves; this space isn’t innocent or inclusive, or flexible enough to shelter just any work. It subtly functions as a physical self-portrait of the Chilean practice Pezo von Ellrichshausen, who, conscious of the power of such an exercise, can only house representations of their own projects. Whether through models, sketches, or photos, each object is a thought and a fact, standing between reality and what the studio wants to say about it. Similarly, the material doesn’t confirm one side or the other.
Aware of the possibility of narration, Pezo von Ellrichshausen establish a discrete grammar to understand their compositions. Selecting the initial Gestalt, a reflection of all their architecture, they avoid details that may cause confusion, connecting the physical object with its name. It is a structural skeleton that, eventually, will form full sentences, or that will remain in the abstract, at the expense of making sense. Pezo von Ellrichshausen provide a basic language, the exegesis of a vocabulary.
Thanks to the simplicity of forms, viewers walk through the space in a circle, returning to the start as many times as they find the end. Each time, they can come up with a different reading, even though the structures are clear in their meaning. These forms function as the studio’s Chomskyan rules that lay the groundwork for their architecture’s theoretical space through an accessible four-sided structure.
Alice asked Humpty Dumpty again: “Can you make words mean so many different things? Must a name mean something?” Maybe it’s only possible if you are an egg, a literal and somewhat strange metaphor for any primal topic. As many times as one uses this museum, as many things s/he can locate in it. And when all the combinations reach a point of exhaustion, Pezo von Ellrichshausen can always take recourse to different meanings, that is, if you, as Alice inquired, are able to make words mean different things. No more or less.
