Korean Housing and Architectural Discourse: A Cross-Cultural Diagnosis and the Quest for Alternatives

 

SPACE Academia – an architectural theory research forum overseen by the monthly journal SPACE (listed on A&HCI) – opened its call for papers and proposals for special issues in February 2025. Now, SPACE Academia announces its second research theme: we invite all researchers to open up new horizons in the study of architecture and urbanism.

 

The Netherlands-based studio Studio Ossidiana has long been committed to experimentation with materials and space, blurring the boundaries between architecture, design, and landscape architecture. They see architecture not as a ‘fixed object’, but as an entity capable of functioning autonomously through interactions with its users—both human and non-human. From 6 ‒ 15 June 2025, as part of ‘Fun Palace’, a joint programme organised by the Centre Pompidou and the Grand Palais Rmn, they filled the Grand Palais’s Salon d’Honneur with a pink fabric installation. This work evokes an imaginary palace while summoning the formative sensation of hiding under a blanket and playing as a child. SPACE listened to the story behind their vision for The Soft Palace.

What Architecture Should Do: KYWC Architects

 

Seogwipo Samda Building faces the First Plaza of Seogwipo in Jeju. Because of the importance of this location, special efforts were devoted to refining the façade. Aluminum louvers that cast deep shadows were installed on the elevation facing the plaza. The repeated deep shadows give the plaza a three-dimensional expression. At the same time, a two-storey circular space responding to the corner was introduced so that the building could assume an appropriate posture for a corner site. The strong frontality of the Seogwipo Samda Building derives from the location of the First Plaza of Seogwipo, which rests against Hallasan Mountain and looks out toward the Pacific Ocean.

What Architecture Should Do: KYWC Architects

 

At The Nature Holdings Office, a large office space is created through an exposed concrete frame structure. The beam frame, organised only along the horizontal axis, gives direction to the interior space and forms a 3m-deep façade layer composed of a grid that resists lateral forces. This 3m-thick spatial layer is subdivided into multiple scales and forms complex relationships as it meets the interior spaces divided at consistent heights.​​

 

More than a rhombus, we understand the working figure in the space to be a square rotated 45 degrees with respect to the axes of the work area. We are interested in the spatiality generated by a figure when it rotates 45 degrees around the directions of its context. If it doesn’t rotate, the spaces remain parallel and of constant dimension. When it rotates around its envelope, the relationships become unbalanced, creating spaces where it approaches its perimeter and spaces where it moves away from it. Furthermore, this rotation introduces the diagonal direction as a strategy for sliding and discovery, changing the usual rules of space.