Park Kyong (1955‒) served as Co-Artistic Director of the Korean Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale. It is less widely known that his career trajectory began more than forty years ago at StoreFront for Art and Architecture (hereinafter StoreFront). StoreFront, the alternative exhibition space in New York that Park, who trained in architecture, founded in his late twenties and led for sixteen years, was a dynamic laboratory for thinking about the city through architecture and raising social issues to the attention of public debate. The exhibitions and projects it presented through multilayered collaborations with architects, artists, and curators from around the world who were then beginning to gain recognition in the 1980s and 1990s came to be seen not as one-off events but as initiatives with wide social impact.

Always a Little Closer to Utopia: BIG

 

"I find the Suzhou gardens fascinating and paradoxical. They look natural but are intensely curated. They feel boundless but adopt small footprints relative to the experiences they create. For me, the gardens are defined by a recurring sense of revelation and delight upon turning a corner. In the Suzhou MoCA, it was important that the garden was something to be discovered and not immediately understood. This was something of a paradox for us, as the architectural organisation was strictly defined by orthogonally laid out ribbons that become both pavilions and walkways. From the Ferris wheel, the gardens appear as a series of individual picture frames—separate objects with their own identities and boundaries. However, once inside you realise that it’s an illusion and the gardens flow into one another. The views become layered—the pavilion corners become compressed passages, leading to framed openings, and then release into a larger landscape. The exploration of the gardens becomes the experience."

Always a Little Closer to Utopia: BIG

 

"I’d describe our philosophy of architecture as utopian pragmatism. Utopia is a place so perfect it can only exist in fiction or imagination. Pragmatism, on the other hand, deals with the world as it actually is, with all its irregularities and imperfections. Combine the two and something happens: whenever we design a space or a place, we try to bring that little corner of the world closer to its dream version. The dream is always specific, so our dream world in Seoul is very different from our dream world in Copenhagen, which is different again from our dream worlds in Italy or New York."

The Youngeun Paper Chungmuro HQ serves as both the corporate headquarters and logistics warehouse for Youngeun Paper, a paper distribution company. It transplants the horizontally expanding warehouse model vertically into a high-density urban centre, combining office space, a gallery, cutting and processing areas, and large-scale storage into a single mixed-use industrial facility. The floor plan and cross-section have been organised to follow the paper handling process: receiving, stacking, cutting, and shipping. A column-free storage area measuring 14×17m has been secured, while the freight elevator, stairwell, and utility core are compactly arranged along one side to accommodate paper pallets and forklift movement.​

 

In the early years of my professional career, I didn’t have a very clear idea of what kind of architecture I wanted to pursue. I was sometimes swept up in the atmosphere. Still, I think I was more focused on architecture itself then. I spent a lot of time thinking about the space itself—how the light would come inside, what the space would smell like, and so on. Studying abroad broadened my perspective. Before, I had looked at architecture from the inside out. Afterward, I began to look from the outside in. I started considering how architecture exists within history, what kind of order it forms within the urban landscape, the structures and orders of old cities, and how buildings should be preserved. Most of the projects in Paris were involved with renovation or extension, and it is very difficult to design something that goes against the established order of an old city. Naturally, my perspective naturally expanded towards the city and the urban context.