District unit planning shapes an urban order, and the Gimhae Yulha District 2 is characterised by a homogeneous urban landscape. This house is situated within this order, yet resists becoming identical to it. Rather than relying on decorative façades, the architecture constructs its identity through sectional and plan-based strategies. The ground floor, designed as a neighbourhood commercial facility which directly engages with the city, draws movement and scenery into the interior through its transparent frontage. The residential spaces above are organised around a shared space that penetrates east to west and is at the centre of daily life.

I was studying contemporary art when the retrospective exhibition of Gabriel Orozco, a Mexico-born artist, was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. One afternoon, I rode the escalators to the top floor, the special exhibitions area. I was reading the exhibition description when I felt something at my feet. A crumbled shoe box. ‘Who would throw away a shoe box in an art museum?’ Confused, I walked into the exhibition hall where I found a caption: ‘Gabriel Orozco, Empty Shoe Box, 1993’. This roused new trains of thought as goosebumps appeared on my arms. The boundary lines concealed in the everyday have expanded. The line between artwork and waste has collapsed.

 

The site retained a hanok and a Japanese-style house, as well as a haphazardly extended warehouse. The entire area was once a central area where Uiseong’s government offices were located during the Joseon dynasty, and it is believed that the hanok was part of the Sangjeongso, an office responsible for administering and enforcing regulations. During the Japanese colonial period, the hanok was used as the Uiseong police station, and the Japanese-style house served as a place to torture anti-Japanese activists. Drawing on the sense of place associated with this oppression and resistance, the design competition called for a memorial hall that would reveal the historical narrative of the anti-Japanese movement centred on Pastor Ju Gi-cheol. The hanok originally featured a traditional layout that conformed to the flow of nature towards the stream to the south. However, the cluster was dismantled within the grid-like road network formed around it after the Japanese colonial period, leaving the hanok as a standalone building. Although it was repaired as a cultural heritage site in the 1960s, subsequent changes in use – as a sports council, kindergarten, and exhibition hall – resulted in the interior losing its spatial order as an hanok almost entirely.

Shaping Architecture Through Conditions: On architects

 

From the beginning of a project to its completion as a physical reality, there are two early moments that determine a project’s destiny: the first encounter with the client and the first encounter with the site. At the first meeting with a client, conversation usually centres on how the site has been selected and eventually purchased. The stories leading to that site are often lengthy. They begin with old family histories, continue through the difficulties of raising funds, and extend to personal dreams that had been held for a long time. As the architect listens to these anecdotes and musings, certain images naturally begin to form in the imagination. The architect then visits the site and finds pertinent clues within its human and physical environment. This is when the figure of the future architecture begins to emerge. If form is a fixed and enclosed result, figure refers to the body of an open place containing a narrative that encompasses the past, present, and future.

 

As if symbolically representing the story behind Chuncheon’s urban growth, the site of the Bandabi Public Sports Center is located within a surplus space surrounded by public facilities. Sandwiched between the Gangwon Do Rehabilitation Hospital, Chuncheon Bukbu Senior Welfare Center, Soyang Elementary School, and a park, this site takes the form of a wedge stretching north to south with only its short southern side bordering the front road. While the spatial conditions may seem somewhat inefficient and awkward, and incapable of accommodating two large-scale programmes (a gymnasium and a swimming pool) simultaneously, the design proposal embraced its irregularity as an important clue to the architectural layout.