Pezo von Ellrichshausen, 120 Doors Pavillion (2003)

  • Designer: Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen (Pezo von Ellrichshausen architecture firm)
  • Location: Ecuador Park, Concepción, Chile
  • Date: 2003
  • Materials: wood, tubular steel

“The 120 Doors Pavilion, installed in Ecuador Park, in the city of Conception, Chile, is a structure of tubular steel tubes supporting wooden standard doors. The doors are arranged in 5 continuous and consecutive perimeters; the outer one with four sides of ten doors each and, inwards, sides of eight, six, four and two doors.

From the authors’ description of the work:

These five perimeters operate as fences that confine a progressive sequence of interiority and depth of the space. Seen from the outside the exterior perimeter is a compact horizontal block. In the interior space is closed laterally and opens to the sky and the ground. This configuration establishes a series of paths along narrow spaces, vertical in section, that dissolve into a cubic central space confined within the smallest perimeter.

With this, what we were really looking for was a way to evidence how relative and artificial the distinctions of limits within a work of architecture are and, hence, within one of art. We are interested in exploring the points of transmission, or friction, between one place and another. We think of the doors as a turning point that subverts temporally the definition of space, adding a dynamic dimension to the construction of walls in a work of architecture, something that could be seen as a key that regulates the fluctuation of forces.

After a brief installation in a public park, the doors were donated to public housing and the structure was the only thing that remained in the place, apparently indestructible due to its nakedness or, as Breuer said about his chairs, because its volume occupies no space.

Two years later (2005) the duo proposed a reduced version of the pavilion featuring “only” 36 doors that was installed in Santiago, Chile.