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Hortus conclusus—the Latin expression for “enclosed garden”—is the name of the Fall 2025 third-year graduate architecture studio led by Chilean architects Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen of Pezo von Ellrichshausen. The duo sees architecture as both a physical and a mental construction, and their studio at Weitzman looks at the relationship of nature and architecture. “There is still a need for basic fantasies, myths and desires,” von Ellrichshausen says.
Pezo von Ellrichshausen has completed many private homes in Chile, including the Poli House, which was awarded the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for emerging architecture. The studio project is a rural cultural residence outside Buenos Aires, Argentina that combines dwelling and workshop, individual and collective spaces.
The studio is part of a series of courses based on Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s concept of “Naïve Intention,” which explores the apparent contradiction between intentionality and chance, rationality and futility, prediction and circumstance, authorship and anonymity.
During Travel Week, students took an inventory of their visits, including small sketches of the interplay between natural and artificial moments. The sketches above are by students Liza Aldridge, Fasai Chainuvati, Tylor Chu, Yiran (Lisa) Liu, Elijah Huggings, and David Owe.
As part of the inventory exercises, students replicated famous landscape paintings in acrylic on paper. Students translated into a building the depiction of nature through the vision of a landscape painter. “In their romantic realism, these initial paintings will be translated into a self referential artificial/natural spatial system,” Pezo says. These studies resulted in a final inventory of 16 painted axonometries (above) based on the qualities and compositions of the paintings.
These are Liza Aldridge and Fasai Chainuvati’s initial schemes for a diamond-shaped square house, drawn here in an axonometric view. Their proposal references forms and colors from the landscape paintings they studied. By adding walls and subtracting roofs, they created enclosed gardens like the ones studied during travel week. The studio’s design exercises are structured around specific obstructions, such as the horizontal format of the building and a given program.
Projects will be located at the very edge of Buenos Aires in the rural region of La Pampa—Argentina’s most prosperous agricultural economy. “We wanted a site with a complex ecosystem that avoids the traditional distinction between “the natural” and “the artificial,” Pezo says. The floorplan of Tylor Chu and Yiran (Lisa) Liu’s project is shown here, as part of the studio mid-review.
