Table of contents for July 2021 in Space

The exhibition ‘Catastrophe and Recovery’, which examines the impact of the spread of Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) on individuals and society, is now on show at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul after opening on May 22. This exhibition presents over 60 works of paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, photos, and videos created by 35 domestic and foreign artists based on their interpretations of the pandemic. Of the five sections, one, ‘Outside Here, Inside There’, discusses the spatial concepts and thinks about how our understanding of space has been transformed by the predominance of non-face-to-face communication. In his new work, ScaledBehaviour_runOn(doorknob_3.11.1) (2021), Do Ho Suh captured the complex new definition of the word ‘contact’ since the onset of the pandemic. This work, which was produced using the scripting language…

‘A moment is a when a person’s life dwells with that of another and leaves a trace. It is also the moment when someone else’s life begins to take place in my life, and at the same time, my life begins to settle in somewhere in the texture of their life’. ‘Traces’, an exhibition that discusses the experiences of creatives drawn from various fields and their interactions, was on show at factory2. The exhibition, held from May 17 to June 6, looked as if it had materialised some of the pages of the book The Lives of Others 2 in the space. The Lives of Others 2 is a publication organised and produced by the visual designer Kang Joosung and consists of photos and essays documented by 12 artists. On…

The spatial design studio flat.m has unveiled a new result of its installation and opening project, NON-FICTION HOME. It is their first new work in six months, since ‘Furniture Settings For Painting Viewers’. They presented nine works, collaborating with the fashion brand Plastic Product on display at the NON-FICTION HOME Archive from June 3 to 13. The two teams wanted to bring a common object found in everyday life to the exhibition. Rather than presenting a well-designed object as it is, the exhibition focuses on discovering other uses for such objects. What caught their eye was the canopy. Flat.m and PLASTIC PRODUCT decided that a new approach would inevitably arise when spatial elements exposed to the external environment were placed inside the building. As they noted, the canopy in the…

The local creative group allabout has unveiled the public art project ‘De-named Zone’. This project, supported by the Korea Tourism Organization, is a browser game guided by the concept that mobile device users explore a version of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) reproduced on the Internet. Until now, Allabout has been steadily creating content about the North-South border area, such as the exhibition ‘DMZ Landscape, Cheorwon’ and through the magazine About DMZ. ‘In a time when tourism has become so difficult due to Coronavirus Disease-19, we sought a contactless form of tourism through media art’, they explained when discussing the background to the content planning. Users who access the homepage (online-dmz.com/game) can experience a space as if they were in the border zone by following the guides resembling animals that inhabit…

‘The 21st International Walk21 Virtual Conference’ hosted by Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) and Walk21 was held from May 26 – 28. This conference was held to examine the pedestrian policies, trends, and prospects of foreign cities, and to promote Seoul’s pedestrian initiatives at home and abroad. Walk21 is an international conference that started in the UK in 2000. Public policy action officers in advanced pedestrian cities, transportation-related organizations, and universities are the main participants in the event. Experts presented relevant cases to the topic and pointed out the pedestrian-related problems in each city around the world. Alice Perrin (researcher, Roads and Mobility Department of Ville de Paris) points out that Paris, France’s blocks are so fragmented that it takes a long time for pedestrians to reach their destination. To solve…

The Space Beneath Overpasses Which Was in Need of Improvement Infrastructure such as railways and bridges, which encouraged rapid economic development in Seoul, was often built with inadequate attention to the surrounding urban context and environment. Traces of this inattention can be found throughout the city, and one of them remains the spaces beneath overpasses. The space beneath overpasses is generally neglected or used as a site for dumping rubbish or parking your car, ruining the aesthetics of the city and presenting issues to public safety and crime prevention. In 2017, Seoul Metropolitan Government promoted a development plan to expand social infrastructure and local community facilities by making use of the spaces beneath overpasses. Six pilot project sites were selected, and the space beneath Jongam-dong Overpass was implemented as part…

Architect Soltozibin Architects (Cho Namho) Design team Jang Moonseok Location Saimdang-ro 19-gil, Seocho-gu, Seoul, Korea Programme single house Site area 282.6m2 Building area 139.78m2 Gross floor area 299.24m2 Building scope B1, 2F Height 8.3m Parking 2 Building to land ratio 49.46% Floor area ratio 76.76% Structure RC, light timber structure Exterior finishing plaster wall (white exposure repair), designated wood siding Interior finishing water based paint on gypsum board Structural engineer Doohang Structures & Consultants Co., Ltd. Construction JIUMJAE Mechanical & electrical engineer Codam Technical Group Design period Oct. 2017 – Mar. 2018 Construction period May 2018 – Feb. 2019 Client Jo Hyun The present name Seocho-dong originates from its previous names ‘Seoripuli’ and ‘Sangcho-ri’ which were given due to the abundance of wild seoripul common to the region. It is said that the…

Architect Soltozibin Architects (Cho Namho), SN Architect (Kim Eunjin, Kim Sangeun) Design team Park Minjeong, Bae Yoonsu (Soltozibin Architects), Kim Jinyoung (SN Architect) Location Mountain 4-36, Chungwoon-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea Programme neighbourhood living facility Building area 222.75m2 Gross floor area 240.56m2 Building scope 1F Height 4.24m Structure RC (existing foundation), timber structure (newly constructed on upper part) Exterior finishing steel grating, wood siding Interior finishing wood Structural engineer SUPIA Construction Construction SUPIA Construction, AZ Engineering&Construction Mechanical engineer Jinwon Technology Group Electrical engineer ELIM E&C Design period Dec. 2018 – May 2019 Construction period July 2019 – Dec. 2020 Client Jongno-gu Office written by Cho Namho The identity of Seoul is based on the unique countenance created by its mountains and the Hangang River. With its beautiful appearance, Inwangsan Mountain embodies living narratives…

Yeouido, an island located in Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul, has played a different role in each era: a mulberry plantation and grassland during the Joseon Dynasty, an airfield during the Japanese colonial period, a political and financial hub since the 1960s. The exhibition, ‘Yeouido, a Sand Island, an Airfield, and a Concrete Jungle’, introduces this long history of transition in Yeouido, and has been on show at the Seoul Museum of History since May 21. Unfolding in chronological order from the 1880s to the 2010s, this exhibition consists of a total of five sections, and it examines the traces and meanings of Yeouido in each era through the documented photographs, drawings, and videos. In the first part, the audience can see the historical data of Yeouido during the Joseon Dynasty when it…

On May 22, the Society of Korean Modern Architecture & Urbanism and Architecture & Urban Research Institute held a joint academic seminar online, under the title ‘Usage of recently returned US military bases to the Korean Peninsula’. Ahn Changmo (professor, Kyonggi University) began his keynote lecture by introducing the current status of the project to return the U.S. military bases to Korea. Of the 82 bases to be returned, 66 have been returned, 4 have been in progress, and 12 undone. Ahn stressed that while ‘the role of environmental experts is now prominent’, ‘the roles of historians, architects and landscape architects should be extended as there are many buildings of high historical value in the base’. While pointing to the history extending from 1945 to the present, he explained the…

On June 9, the Seoul Metropolitan City Space Improvement Bureau (hereinafter SMCSIB) released the video series ‘Future of the Urban Records: Data Curation’, interviewing experts who record aspects of Seoul with state-of-the-art technology. Unlike ‘People Documenting Cityscapes’ last year, where people from various professions asked what was worth documenting, this series shares a digital way to capture the city. The first protagonist in the series is Kim Hojung (principal, AllBIM Technologies). He talked about the background of recording historically significant places such as Dangilli Power Plant, SPACE Group of Korea Building, Baeksa Village, and Arko Arts Theater with 3D scanner technology. He added, ›At a time when urban redevelopment projects are increasing like these days, it is necessary to record places in digital media and utilize the data in areas…

EXHIBITION SPACE 7 Yoon Wonhwa, a visual culture researcher, wrote a series of articles. Focus on the place where the exhibition is placed and talk about the exhibition. Exhibitions move places in the form of images and data and change their appearance in various ways. These articles look back on the places where exhibitions appear. The German Pavilion, located in the Giardini at the Venice Biennale, a monument to the Nazi aesthetic, has long fought its own history. The attempts to reveal and defeat the ghosts of the past still etched across these surfaces have often emptied and harmed the building. In 1993, when Hans Haacke broke the floor of main hall of the building and Paik Nam June surrounded it with heterogeneous images and sounds, their activities bluntly adopted…

For a long time, Cho Namho (principal, Soltozibin Architects) has pursued a universal architectural type by interrogating the essential qualities of architecture such as topos, typos, and tectonics. In this search, he came to use the wood construction as a rational and effective tool. Emphasising the flexible nature of the wood construction as regards the conditions of reality, Cho continuously experimented on combining different structures such as reinforced concrete. In this way, he proposes the possibility of wood construction as a new compositional system. To better understand the extent to which Cho preserves the characteristic spatiality of wooden architecture while also creating differences and widening the spectrum according to its usage, from housing to public projects, let us look to his recent works.…

The 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, originally scheduled for May 2020, was delayed once to August due to the Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) global pandemic, and then again rescheduled for 2021. Still not immune to the impact of the pandemic, the event finally opened on the 22nd of May. Since the construction of the Korean Pavilion in Giardini Della Biennale, SPACE has remained on-the-scene with reporting about the Biennale, but we could not visit this time. Now we are in the post-COVID-19 era, it is ever more apparent that we cannot return to the way things once were. The architectural exhibition also faces inevitable changes. During the pandemic, SPACE is going to sketch the response of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, one that will be open until the 21st of November even…

In 2020, two guard posts, which stood at the foot of Inwangsan mountain for half a century, were reopened as public buildings: Inwang Guard Post Forest Retreat (refer to pp. 84 – 87) and Inwangsan Guardpost-Bookcafe. The latter, designed by Lee Chungkee (professor, Universuty of Seoul) and GONGMYUNG ARCHITECTURAL & URBAN DESIGN OFFICE (principal, Kim Jinsook), underwent renovation and extension, using remnants from the old guard post to devise a contrast to the contemporary structure with a novel sense of transparency and openness. Let’s see how a closed security facility became an open space embracing its surroundings. Choi Eunwha (Choi): As we can see from its name, the Inwangsan Guardpost-Bookcafe is a bookstore in a former guard post. Why was the existing building built and for what reasons? Lee Chungkee…

The artist Joo Jaehwan presents humourous yet acerbic insight on key issues of Korean modernity and the webtoon (web cartoon) artist Joo Homin explores the notion of afterlife in Korean mythology. The exhibition ‘Homin and Jaehwan’ runs at the Seoul Museum of Art until Aug. 1 as an exhibition presenting the works of father and son. The exhibition presents the interplay between the distinct genres of art and webtoon by the two artists, shedding light in various ways on the rapport between father and son and transformation accorded by the specificity of medium. Around four decades lies between the father born in 1940 and the son born in 1981. Nevertheless, the approaches they use transcend generations, threaded together through how they present social messages through image. Their works are better…

The function lies at the birth of every piece of furniture. A chair is for sitting on, a table is for placing an object, and a bed is for lying down. But for furniture, the function is not everything. When minimum requirements are met, it is possible to try new forms, and experiment with materials and techniques. Recently, such a movement of ‘art furniture’ has become active in Korean furniture design. ‘Point Zero of the Haus’, an ongoing exhibition at musinsa terrace in Donggyo-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul, also pays attention to this movement. This exhibition began with the planning of the gallery ‘meeseek’, which has been continuously seeking and introducing new Korean designers and artists since 2019. ‘Point Zero’ means the moment when everything, including different objects and furniture in daily…

The exhibition ‘Mapping Future Agenda of Public Space in Seoul’ is on show at gallery HOUR in Seoul Hall of Urbanism & Architecture since June 8 to 20. ‘Mapping Future Agenda of Public Space in Seoul’ is based on the year 2045, 24 years from now on, and predicts the upcoming changes in Seoul, presenting the process of seeking countermeasures in urban context accordingly. The city of Seoul, the host of this exhibition, recognised the issue that although the expansion of public facilities enhanced the citizenry’s standard of living, such facilities are concentrated in certain areas, lacking in the connection between facilities. In addition, they said that the exhibition was planned because a new spatial solution that can resolve isolation and imbalance is needed. The exhibition is based on the…

The Korea Institute of Landscape Architecture (KILA) held its sixth monthly webinar on June 11 under ‘Smart Park’. This webinar was planned to redefine the status of local park greenery as an integrated infrastructure supporting the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The event began with the opening speech and presentation of Kim Hyun (professor, Dankook University). Kim introduced the social, economic and environmental values and roles of urban parks as green infrastructure to realize the smart green city and presented specific indicators for constructing smart parks such as water circulation rate, green connectivity and accessibility through domestic and foreign examples. Jeon Joohee (designer, GroupHAN Associates) then presented a case of smart park design conducted for the 5-1 living area of the Multifunctional Administrative City. Introducing the Korean smart city design strategy considering…

Design Competition for Namsan Creative Center Zero-Energy Building Remodeling On May 27, the results of the Design competition for Namsan Creative Center Zero-Energy Building (ZEB) Remodeling were announced. This competition was held as part of a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by converting old public buildings into zero-energy buildings. The winner is ‘Inserting the Void In Between’, a proposal jointly submitted by Hyuong-gul Kook (professor, Ewha Womans University) and JEOH Architects (principal, Oh Hyunil). It draws upon natural light in an active manner with minimal distortion while taking advantage of the height of the existing building to insert a new space (an atrium) by partially cutting the arched roof. On the southern side of the building, the blocked wall was opened to create terraces and balconies, suffusing the building…

THING Everyone has something that they care about. This article is about the things that protect and brighten the everyday lives of architects. The necessity to put stuff on my body is one of my pet peeves. I have never worn watches, rings, neck chains, or earrings, not even in my earliest years. I gave up wearing the wristwatch that private class soldiers usually wear (though I had it in my pocket all the time) as soon as I had been discharged from boot camp. I was even permitted to take off my wedding ring following the ceremony. It is not the same with clothes as it is with accessories. As I feel anxious about my possessions, I developed a skill for disposing of my belongings. Given this affectation, I…

Architect Simplex Architecture (Park Chungwhan, Song Sanghun) Design team Jung Eunseon, Lee Hyunwoo, Jeong Seongwook Location 3-1288, Jongam-dong, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Korea Programme exercise facility Site area 1,455m2 Building area 751.06m2 Gross floor area 693.77m2 Building scope 1F Height 7.8m Building to land ratio 51.62% Floor area ratio 47.7% Structure steel structure, wooden structure Exterior finishing low-e coated glass, red cedar panel, polycarbonate Interior finishing birch plywood, red cedar panel, tile, wooden deck, wooden flooring Structural engineer LAIM Information Technology Co., Ltd Construction Sobo Construction Mechanical and electrical engineer Codam Technical Group Design period June - Nov. 2019 Construction period Mar. - Dec. 2020 Client Seongbuk-gu Office…

As the pandemic continues to exert its hold, more people have become interested in plants. According to NAVER Data Lab, the number of searches for ‘plant’ and ‘garden’ increased by 127% and 212% respectively in May of this year when compared to those in January 2020, before the severe proliferation of Coronavirus Disease-19. A newly coined word ‘pet plant’ has appeared, which means to take care of plants as opposed to a animal pet, along with ‘planterior’ and ‘home gardening’ now in vogue. Plants are increasingly becoming the main element in a space. One noteworthy fact is that the movement of plants into private spaces has recently been on the rise. It is different to walking up a mountain close one’s house or taking a stroll in the park. It…