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Architects: Pezo von Ellrichshausen
- Area: 30 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Pezo von Ellrichshausen
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Lead Architects: Pezo von Ellrichshausen (Mauricio Pezo & Sofía von Ellrichshausen)
Text description provided by the architects. Before any social contract and right after our supposed subjective singularity, there is an individual mirrored in another individual, that is: a couple.
This unified character, synthesized in the double portrait (from Van Eyck to Hockney), is the idealized and certainly romantic inhabitant for this enigmatic piece. Its figure, a stable equilateral triangle with almost no thickness, a kind of scaleless and building-less pediment, becomes the theatrical setting for a dramatic double relationship: facing its only access, through a projection beyond its interior, turning the facade into a threshold between here and there; once inside, the projection becomes a direct, intimate, and inevitable relationship between one person and another at the opposite end.
Who are they? Maybe a real couple (a mother and her son, two friends, or two strangers), perhaps a fictional couple (one and their dreams, idols, or shadows).
The pavilion is certainly a space separate from the everyday world. It is a room for two, a resting place, a meeting space, a void filled with tension. A vertical division, a gap in ordinary life, simply transfigured into a supernatural domain, even into a superstition, appears through an asymmetric peephole cut against the sky, occupying the unreachable corner of the interior. Such is the tension within this compact artifact.
From a distance, its regular silhouette exudes a discreet sense of monumentality, not only as a sign of itself but as a landmark outside of time. In explicit contrast with the surrounding landscape, its mirrored cladding (in a regular pattern of stacked stones) aims to reveal the subtle moods of the local climate. Eventually, this flat figure will become a screen; the sun on the snow or a frozen pyramid for the summer season.
*Note: The pavilion is conceived in two stages; a temporary installation in the urban context of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and its complete recycling for the permanent installation in a new botanical garden in Gyeonggi Province.
