SELECTED WORKS
BRICK OVEN
NAÏVE INTENTION
NAÏVE INTENTION
Yale School of Architecture
Instructor: Mauricio Pezo, Sofia Von Ellrichshausen, Jose Aragues
Group Member: Hope Chao
Spring, 2023
Instructor: Mauricio Pezo, Sofia Von Ellrichshausen, Jose Aragues
Group Member: Hope Chao
Spring, 2023
— Gaston Bachelard
Together with the cave, the bullring, the foundational grid, and many other figures, the brick oven can also be understood as a perfect machine. Since its purpose lies not only in how it is meant to function but also in everything it evokes, its role becomes diffuse, elusive—sometimes abstract, sometimes symbolic.
According to Argentinian writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, the brick oven still encapsulates our remote technology in the so-called “New World”: it is a device that produces raw material with raw material—in other words, “nothing new.” Indeed, the brick oven is not architecture (i.e., an artifact designed for inhabitation), yet it serves as a fertile metaphor for an attitude toward architectural production: the architectural project as a conceptual tool to anticipate the future, to foresee the invisible, to construct the inexorable opacity that intensifies human existence.
Rather than a mere material artifact, the brick oven becomes an imaginary detour—a poetic image—inasmuch as it has a familiar presence yet remains unusually conventional, perhaps governed by a normative size that incarnates the human body in every single block.