SPACE December 2025 (No. 697)
‘Now, in a dream, our mind continuously does this. We create and perceive our world simultaneously, and our mind does this so well that we don’t even know it’s happening. That allow us to get right in the middle of that process. (How?) By taking over the creating part. Now, this is where I need you: you create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream and they fill it with their subconscious. (How could I ever acquire enough detail to make them think that it’s reality?) Well, dreams, they feel real while we’re in them, right? It’s only when we wake up that we realise something was actually strange. Let me ask you a question: you never really remember the beginning of the dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what’s going on. (I guess, yeah.) So how did we end up here?’
— Inception (2010)
How do we come to remember a place? When one day our architecture is gone and someone visits the site, in what way will they recall that absent structure? To reach a destination, we pass through countless landscapes. Yet, as we move through them, we rarely remember each as a distinct event. We simply register them unconsciously – ‘there’s the sea, there’s the mountain, so many trees’ – and move on.
When people finally arrive at their destination, they often confront all those passing landscapes as a single, composite frame in their memory. In contrast, those who experience GAENGGO BANJIHA arrive not at the conclusion of a sequence of landscapes, but at the extension of the unconscious journey that led them there. In other words, this space is not remembered as one complete and sequential exterior landscape, but as an unconsciously perceived part among many.
An unconscious sensation that precedes human awareness, thoughts on how a place will be remembered through these sensations: this is where our designs begin.
