Print, Trace, Paint. Rinse and Repeat.
Notes on Pezo
von Ellrichshausen’s Naïve Intention, 2018.
April 2024
(Reading Time: 7 min)
(Reading Time: 7 min)
I need to come clean about two things. One, the more I learn about PvE, the less I am drawn to the work. Two, the more I read about PvE, the less sense it makes. Nonetheless, perhaps that is the ultimate objective of their work.
PvE’s body of work presented in Naïve Intention has an enigmatic quality to it. Perusing through the monograph, the oil paintings, the monumental volumes, and the ambivalent yet primitive geometries enchant me. Yet I find myself inundated with endless queries. The rationality behind the projects, with their cryptic names and numbers, dissipates. With a superficially thin and light physical appearance, the more I flip the monograph back and forth, the more discombobulated I get. The inherent arbitrariness in the order of presentation, the intrinsic intuitive manipulation of the mass and void in the projects, and the occasional visual imprints of Pezo and von Ellrichshausen tell me one thing—the monograph has an intended audience. It is a love letter written to each other.
Production in Architecture
Besides being a love letter to each other, it is also a love letter to their idiosyncratic production in architecture. Naturally, this production in architecture is their love language. Naïve Intention exemplifies four traits in contemporary architectural production. Even though these characteristics are not individually unique to PvE, the combination of all four aspects makes up their signature.
First, a massive quantity of iterations within a single project is brought to attention. This is particularly noticeable in PvE’s painting series, Finite Format. An innocent form, usually depicted in isometric drawings, gets repeated multiple times in watercolor or in similar painterly qualities. Each series ranges from 200 pieces to up to 2,200 pieces. In a digital-driven world, this surplus in the production of architecture is instead physical. Instead of utilizing technological tools to generate billions of results in a matter of minutes, they opted for medieval labor. A return to the primitives. Here, PvE also cites Benjamin to argue for an erasure of authorship through this repetitive labor. PvE writes, “Mechanical labor and production, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, do not only erode the presence of the author but also the believed “aura” of a genuine work of art. That tedious repetitive practice, by means of its mere repetition, tends to reduce the significance of the individual touch.”[1] Now, whether PvE’s repetition truly obscures authorship and removes aura is another debatable notion.
Next, PvE often works with repetitive reproduction of representation. A house can be represented in multiple media multiple times, and they each have a life on their own. This could be a photograph, a painting, a model, a photograph of a model, a built project, or a painting again. It is almost as if their architecture never ceases. For instance, Poli House was represented numerous times throughout the monograph. These artifacts live parallel lives, and they coexist. Even though this trait of their labor here is like the previous aspect, it is embracing the oscillation between media. Therefore, this means PvE’s production of artifacts is ever-growing. The surplus is limitless.
Thirdly, the office is obsessed with numbers. With all that surplus in production, Pezo and von Ellrichshasen also like to count. It seems like a ritual for them. A chant, if you will. The concept art that PvE showcases in their monograph is an army of irrational numbers on top of graph paper. Each number would occupy a pixel. This piece is then titled 40412031331. As interpreters of their work, we are presented with another riddle. From what one may infer, the eleven-digit title has a high possibility of being an anagram of the date and time. However, it is still unclear as to what the rationale behind the naming mechanism is. By obscuring the project names, PvE’s statement on what architecture means to them corroborates. They write, “… we do not believe architecture has to solve problems, or not only that. Architecture is a problem in itself, and a complex one. Accordingly, architectonic intentions should not be solutions to a need.”[2]In other words, PvE does not see architecture as a service industry. For them, architecture is not a response; rather, it is autonomous. Designating the project names as a riddle makes PvE only answer to themselves. It is a closed and insulated identity.
Lastly, compounded with the autonomy that PvE strives for, the typical client-architect relationship is also evidently upended here. PvE takes on the hybrid role of owner-worker in their architecture practice. Their surplus in production and the multimedia reproduction of representations affirm their identity as owners of their projects. Naïve Intention, for instance, is arguably the epitome of their owner-worker role. It is a monograph for themselves and by themselves. However, it is imperative to note that they do not solely work on their own, despite their notable reclusiveness. Pezo and von Ellrichshausen travel around the world to teach at universities. Thus, architecture students are their bona fide workers. Naïve Intention includes numerous student works, and these works often resonate with their Finite Format series in terms of the surplus in production. At IIT in 2015, the students created 200 models of a building type. In the same year, students at Porto Academy produced 500 summer houses for the studio. Here, university students, as workers for PvE, offer free labor in exchange for knowledge and experience. In some ways, this is reminiscent of Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation. He writes, “The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears primitive because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and the mode of production corresponding with it.”[3]Here, university students are separated from Pezo and Ellrichshausen, the owner. Students are also divorced from the office of PvE, which is the means of production and the factory of architecture.
Living and Working
It may seem inevitable that PvE, who wears the hat of an owner-worker, needs to take advantage of student labor. After all, PvE is not a corporate office. It is both a home and an office. From the observation on Naïve Intention as a form of love letter, it is apparent that Pezo and von Ellrichshausen are partners in life as well. The monograph includes a photograph in which the two are frolicking in a circle, and a pair of reciprocal portrait drawings of each other concludes the work as well. This is important to note because there is another form of labor involved in the workings of PvE—domestic labor. This introduces a blurred boundary between types of labor. It also means that PvE’s architecture production and its auxiliary labor may be perpetual and ceaseless.
So far, I’ve discussed PvE’s surplus in physical production of architecture and the double types of labor that PvE is involved with. All of that is to lead to PvE’s seminal project depicted in Naïve Intention. This is the Cien House in Concepcion, Chile. This project takes up the most spread in the monograph, and it embodies the owner-worker role comprehensively. Cien House is a self-commissioned project that encompasses three functions for PvE: a home, an office, and a workshop. My argument here is that Cien House is the “temple” of PvE. This notion of “temple” has a meaning that is two-fold.
First, Cien House is a temple in the sense that it refers to Mario Liverani’s writing on Uruk in ancient civilization. Temple, in the context of Liverani, is an organism in the era of the early state, where its function is to protect and store the surplus in production. Its objective is to mediate the relationship between administrators and workers. Liverani writes, “The temple was the only institution that could convince producers to give up substantial parts of their work for the advantage of the community and its administrators, represented by their divine hypostases.”[4]Being the home turf of PvE, Cien House utterly matches Liverani’s description. PvE invites people and students (workers) to Cien House often to understand and experience the building. Due to the enigmatic nature of PvE’s work, visitors or workers often yearn for PvE’s explanation to grasp the transcendental profundity. Consequently, students offer their labor to produce even more surplus in PvE’s architecture.
Secondly, the physical context of PvE’s Cien House, compounded with the ritualistic labor that the office performs, makes the home/office/atelier a temple. The house sits at the periphery of a city on a hilly landscape. It is located at a high point that overlooks the ocean and the city. A certain remoteness and seclusion seem to be built into Cien House as well. This reclusive quality is also present in PvE’s own writing at the beginning of the monograph. “As discreet instigators of unexpected angles for the project, in their non-authoritative anonymity, they [PvE, or arbitrator-architect] do not interfere with the real problems of the world.”[5]PvE does not desire friction with the public, the complexities, or the politics of the world. They’d like to be left alone. They are practically and functionally architectural monks, and Cien House might just be their monastery.
Naïve Intention was published in 2018. If monographs are an instrument that architects utilize to demarcate the end of a body of work, then being confused by Naïve Intention makes me curious what state the seminal project, Cien House, is in as of 2024. We also learn from Liverani that the temple is a beacon of civilization, and we need to follow in the footsteps of the temple. He writes, “It is thus in the temple that we must look for the institutional organism that gave rise to the transformation. Its growth is the critical factor, the true structural change that transformed the settlements of Lower Mesopotamia from egalitarian communities to complex organisms.”[6]Without any surprise, there is indeed a new monastery for PvE and by PvE. Pezo and von Ellrichshausen have self-commissioned, designed, and built another temple in Yungay, Chile, in 2022, called Luna House. The new temple has now grown, and this corroborates with another quote from Liverani on Uruk: “The gradual increase in size of temples during the Ubaid and Early Uruk phases […] represents a good parallel to the simultaneous increase in size in agricultural yield.”[7]Here, we have the proof that PvE has accumulated from all that surplus production, and it is in demand for a larger temple in a different city.
On the other hand, Cien House has since become a product on Airbnb. It is now charging sixty-nine to ninety-six dollars per night. And PvE has become part of the advertisement. Rinse and repeat. It is both the monastic ritual and the cyclic nature of primitive accumulation. Learning from Pezo von Ellrichshausen, sometimes when we are confounded, maybe it is better to stay intentionally naïve.
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[1] Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Naïve Intention. (New York: Actar Publishing, 2018.), 21.
[2] Ibid., 11.
[3] Marx, Karl. “Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, Book One: The Process of Production of Capital. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Edited by Frederick Engels. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), 506.
[4] Mario Liverani. “Chapter 2: Social Transformation of the Territory,” in Uruk: The First City. Translated by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop. (London: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006), 25.
[5] Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Naïve Intention. (New York: Actar Publishing, 2018.), 20.
[6] Mario Liverani. “Chapter 2: Social Transformation of the Territory,” in Uruk: The First City. Translated by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop. (London: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006), 24.
[7] Ibid., 24.