Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s Casa Luna and Casa Guna are often described through the familiar vocabulary of contemporary concrete architecture—monolith, prism, fortress, abstraction. Yet what makes these houses persuasive is not primarily their formal bravura and severe minimalism, but the way each project re-stages the ethical question of Brutalism’s heritage: how can architectural frankness, mass, and severity be reconciled with human scale, lived ritual, and environmental attentiveness, without dissolving into picturesque sentimentality and stiffness?
Both works argue that the ethical lesson of Brutalist architecture is not a matter of nostalgia, but of discipline: spatial order as a framework for life; material candor as a refusal of cosmetic sustainability; and landscape engagement as an operative constraint rather than an aesthetic backdrop.
Casa Luna: A Private Cloister in the Foothills
Casa Luna (completed 2022) sits in Chile’s Yungay region at the foot of the Andes, on a large rural property near the Cholguán River. What appears, at first glance, to be a single monumental house is explicitly described by the architects as an aggregate of twelve distinct concrete buildings, separated by visible seismic joints. This is not a minor technical detail; it is the project’s ethical key. The joints are simultaneously structural prudence and conceptual articulation: the ‚house‘ is not a unified object imposed on a site, but a federation of parts—a small settlement—whose separations remain legible.
The most productive reading of Casa Luna is as a monastery-type private dwelling: not because it imitates monastic style, but because it reconstructs the monastery’s spatial ethics—enclosure, procession, interval, repetition, and the productive tension between seclusion and community. Multiple sources explicitly characterize the ensemble as cloister-like, resisting easy classification as either house or museum. The monastery analogy is therefore not metaphorical decoration; it names a programmatic hybridity: domestic life braided with work and exhibition space in a single disciplined order.
Human scale through subdivision and rhythm
Casa Luna’s mass is undeniable, but its human scale is achieved by decomposition. Twelve buildings create thresholds, corners, pauses, and short distances; the body is repeatedly re-measured against discrete volumes rather than one totalizing megastructure. The ensemble’s grid-like disposition and the legibility of the joints cultivate an architecture of countable parts—a crucial ethical move for large concrete work: it refuses the authoritarian smoothness of a single block and instead offers a spatial ecology of smaller decisions.
This is precisely where Brutalism’s heritage can be renewed. In much postwar work, the critique of scale is not that buildings are large, but that they are indifferent to the increments of everyday life—to the cadence of walking, turning, stopping, meeting. Casa Luna counters this by turning monumentality into monastic repetition: thick walls and severe geometries become the background against which minor variations—light shifts, framed views, a change in corridor width—gain existential weight.
Environmental sensitivity as custodianship, not camouflage
Casa Luna’s relationship to the environment is not soft. It does not disappear into the landscape; it stands in deliberate contrast. Yet environmental sensitivity can also be read as custodianship: the project is situated within a large rural estate, and reportage around the site links the architects’ broader on-site initiatives to forest protection and cultural production in nature. Even if one brackets the philanthropic framing, the house’s environmental stance is visible in a more architectural way: by treating the landscape as something to be observed, bounded, and respected through distance rather than consumed as scenery through glassy sprawl.
That said, an ethically serious acclaim must register the tension: exposed concrete is carbon-intensive, and Casa Luna’s scale invites questions about embodied energy, maintenance, and long-term thermal performance—especially in a period when ‚heritage ethics‘ can no longer be separated from climate ethics. The project’s rebuttal is not a technical datasheet (at least not in the published narratives), but an architectural claim: durability, legibility, and long life as a counterweight to disposable construction culture. In that sense, Casa Luna aligns with the best of Brutalist ethics: it asks to be maintained, not replaced.
Casa Guna: Topography, Orientation, and the Elevated Square
Casa Guna (completed 2014) occupies a narrow plot hemmed between a steep hillside and a eucalyptus wood, descending toward a lagoon in the Concepción area (often cited as San Pedro de la Paz / Llacolén). Its canonical diagram is a stark structural contradiction: a square upper floor measuring 20m per side balanced on a much smaller lower floor (about 8.5m per side). The move is more than sculptural drama; it is a method of environmental negotiation. By concentrating the ground contact and expanding the upper level, the house appears to touch the slope lightly while giving the main living plane a commanding horizon line over the lagoon.
Architectura Viva describes the upper level as a “dogmatic piano nobile,” ruled by the square, with rooms arranged around a central courtyard and connected by long corridors. This is critical: the project is not a free-form response to nature, but a confrontation between strict geometry and contingent terrain. The “environmental sensitivity” lies in the precision of placement and orientation, not in organic form-making. Another account emphasizes the domestic arrangement according to cardinal orientation and the natural landscape—suggesting that daily life is organized as a calibrated sequence of rooms and views.
Human scale via interior choreography
If Casa Luna finds human scale through subdivision, Casa Guna finds it through choreography. The corridors, courtyard, and square skylights support a lived experience of movement and pause—an interior promenade that turns the monolith into a navigable instrument. The courtyard, in particular, is a classic ethical device: it produces an ‚outside‘ that belongs to the house without claiming more landscape as private territory. In that sense, Casa Guna’s environmental discipline is paradoxically urban: it imports the logic of an inner court to a rural waterside setting, refusing the lazy equation of nature with openness.
A critical note on the lagoon edge
The acclaim should nonetheless remain exacting. A house that “stakes a fearless claim” (Wallpaper*, 20 October 2022) on a lagoon edge inevitably raises questions of privatization of landscape and ecological disturbance, regardless of how carefully it is positioned. Casa Guna’s ethical strength is that it does not pretend innocence: it is overt about being an artifact—severe, square, emphatic. Whether one reads that as honesty or as aloofness depends on one’s threshold for architectural dominance in fragile settings.
Toward an Ethics of Brutalist Heritage, Not Brutalist Style
Taken together, Casa Luna and Casa Guna propose a useful distinction for the current moment: neo-Brutalism as an ethic rather than an image. Their concrete is not merely a texture for atmosphere; it is tied to claims about permanence, legibility, and the seriousness of construction. Their monumentality is not (only) an aesthetic posture; it is organized to recover human measure—through aggregation in Luna, through choreographed interior order in Guna. (ArchDaily, 9 May 2023)
If there is a single ethical thread that links these works to Brutalism’s most defensible heritage, it is the insistence that architecture can still be a moral technique of attention: attention to the human scale, to the body’s movement and the discipline of daily routines; to the difference between landscape as commodity and landscape as responsibility; and to the long horizon of buildings that are meant to endure—physically and conceptually—well beyond the fashions that first celebrated them.
Luigi Monzo 