UCLA AUD Fall 2026 Events: Pezo von Ellrichshausen, "Window Wall"

October 22, 2026, 5:30 pm, Perloff Hall Decafe

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 Louis Kahn Visiting Professors at Yale University, have been Professor of the Practice at AAP Cornell University and visiting critics at Harvard GSD, UC Berkeley, UPenn, Tokyo University, the IIT in Chicago, the University of Texas in Austin, 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. Their work has been distinguished with the Mies Crown Hall Americas Emerge Prize by the IIT, the Rice Design Alliance Prize, the Iberoamerican Architecture Biennial Award, and the Chilean Architecture Biennial Award. The work of the studio has been widely published and edited in monographic issues of El Croquis, AV in Madrid, A+U in Tokyo, 2G in Barcelona and in the essay books Proto Vernacular (Maas Lawrence, 2026), Form of Knowledge (Thymos, 2025), Window Wall (B Architecture, 2024), Naïve Intention (Actar, 2018) and Spatial Structure (B Architecture, 2016).

Through a panoramic review of Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s body of work, the lecture will introduce a theoretical background about the intersection between painting and building. Following the title of a recent book, the presentation will reflect about the figure-ground visual paradox in its extension to a fundamental architectonic problem: that of the reciprocity between literal and nominal opacity.