The project is a part of a wider town planning project that has been ongoing for about five years. The Sakaushi laboratory of Tokyo University of Science, has been working with Fujiyoshida City for about five years to create a greater sense of flow of people in the city by reusing empty houses. We converted an icehouse (‘himuro’ in Japanese) into a gallery and also renovated a neighbouring vacant house into a short-term residential house.

Prior to renovation, the Seoul Foreign School Elementary School Library functioned only as a general repository for books and provision of desk space without the proper regard for the scale of its younger members. The design goal for renovation was to blend flexibility with specificity.

Ionic columns adorn a barbeque restaurant; a Corinthian porch shelters an entrance to multi-family houses; Renaissance-style decorations embellish the facades of hotels and even college buildings: an anonymous and banal architecture that seemingly derives from the West forms the landscape of the very modern Asian city, Seoul—the place in which aoa architects have long practiced, and in which its co-principals Suh Jaewon and Lee Euihaing have developed their distinctive architectural languages – critically accepting this disordered urban setting with distinctive humour and sarcasm, and seeking the possibilities for how ‘Korean-ness’ in Seoul can be translated into architecture. They believe that those aspects that enlighten architects lie in the conditions of everyday life, and that what makes architects truly proud is the facing up to reality with straightforwardness.