Amidst the busy flow of urban life, many are constantly on the move to keep the city running. Foremost among them, delivery riders. Emerging in large numbers following the contactless environment accelerated by the pandemic, this profession, and the spaces created for it, raise important questions for us today. Behind the Baemin Rider School, which recognises platform workers as subjects of architecture, lie numerous unresolved issues such as poor working conditions, pressure from speed-driven competition, and the public’s ambivalent attitude that views riders as both essential and as threats to road safety. The Baemin Rider School was conceived within these contradictions, and through questioning what a corporation can do between the poles of profit-seeking and social responsibility. Within it coexist aspirations and frustrations, achievements and unresolved ambitions. Conversations with the planner and designer of the project trace the making of this space and explore its potential as an initial step toward confronting these challenges.

 

Moon Sun Jae is a house designed for a humanities professor whose parents were both poets. Built on a site where the poet couple once lived and amassed personal memories, it serves as a modest weekend retreat and a quiet community space for writers. The project seeks to honour both the literary legacy of the previous generation and to create a sanctuary in which poetry, literature, and the surrounding landscape may continue to be woven together within contemporary life. Here, architecture does not claim to reconstruct memory or preserve the past. Instead, through a non-monumental attitude that retreats into the background of the surrounding landscape and everyday life, it allows memory to be experienced anew in the present. Rather than inventing a new form, the design process was one of reading the layers of time embedded in the site, acknowledging the views that had long existed there, understanding the ways in which people had inhabited it, and translating these qualities into space.

Establishing Order and Relation in the Les Jardins de Médongaule: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

 

Only when the soul is freed from its body, when its spirit is elevated to a noble and transcendental domain, does the transition from life to death become a form of liberation. Redeemed from such a cage, the public square is no longer an empty territory but a hardscape surrounded by mute sentinels. We only look up to the sky in wander because there is a solid soil to stand on, because there is an imaginary separation from the rest of the world. Within a crowd or in solitude, following Kazantzakis’ Odysseus or Zorba, every human being is meant to make a unique spiritual journey.

Establishing Order and Relation in the Les Jardins de Médongaule: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

 

‘What is that thing?’ This key opening question to the story should remain open. In our view, a literary work can be translated into many languages but it cannot be illustrated out of the domain of words without betraying the countless images it conveys. Thus, our interpretation for Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s famous story (The Little Prince, 1943) avoids literal representation. At the blurred edges between phenomenological and metaphysical experience, dwelling at the very heart of Les Jardins de Médongaule, there is an enigmatic void open to the firmament. Evocative of an idealised desert, this is an empty and dry landscape barely visible from its immediate surroundings. It has the presence of a circular room contained within a thick, solid fence, a low wall with a deceiving scale.

Establishing Order and Relation in the Les Jardins de Médongaule: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

 

Within an existing dry garden surrounded by a green pergola, there is a deceptively modest room devoted to Buddha’s ascetic principles. The room follows the rectangular language of its surroundings and its bare, rough, material expression. The room is a monolith, a compact object entirely made out of reinforced concrete with thick recycled and exposed aggregate. The room is deceptive in at least two respects. Upon arrival, it responds to the axial symmetry of the garden and yet, since it is ornate in its finely tuned brick-like patterning, it does not unveil its true scale.