Cho Junggoo principal, guga urban architecture × Kim Yeram
Kim Yeram (Kim): Why did you decide to launch wednesday survey?
Cho Junggoo (Cho): I embarked on wednesday survey not long after opening my firm in 2000, with the thought that I should attend more closely to Seoul as the city in which I live. wednesday survey can be thought to have begun after I first visited Jongmyo Shrine, and feeling disinclined to choose the next venue, I decided to ‘continue the survey’ in the adjacent neighbourhood. I would take a leisurely walk around unfamiliar neighbourhoods as if to slowly scan them, record these paths through photography, interviewing the people who lived there and jotting down my impressions as a survey report. Currently we are carrying out measured surveys of the Cheonggyecheon Stream and Eulji-ro districts.
Kim: What kind of significance, architecturally speaking, can be derived from surveying a district as a group rather than individually?
Cho: As according to the firm’s motto ‘Searching for Representations of Life’, I feel that the experience of empathising with and sharing one’s thoughts, while simultaneously surveying a district, is extremely important. What might have remained undiscovered or may have not caught the eye when observed in isolation, might be noted by someone else. It is also pleasurable to get together and observe the many variations in the built environment established within a village and to imagine and work out how they came to be.
Kim: What kind of research projects have you carried out through the wednesday survey?
Cho: Every other year we have carried out measured surveys, masterplans, additional measured surveys and concept designs for local public facilities every other year at the Donui-dong Jjokbangchon village. In 2009, we also carried out a year-long status use and measurement survey of the alleyways of Seochon, as well as existing condition and measurement surveys, and proposals for alternative measures. In Gyonam-dong, we researched and carried out measurements of the village before it was demolished for redevelopment with Kyonggi University and Archidogam, and we produced and exhibited this as a model, actual measured drawings, video works, among other things, commissioned by the Seoul Museum of History.
Kim: How are the resources accumulated in surveys stored and how are they eventually reproduced?
Cho: They are classified by photographs, route maps and impressions, with the measured surveys archived separately. The results have been recreated as studies like the 2009 Seochon Survey Report, the 2010 Venice Biennale exhibition, the 2018 Donuimun Exhibition Hall, the Life and Culture Survey of the Seoul Museum of History, and these have been published as a series on the website NAVER and in daily newspapers under the title of ‘Seoulscape’.
Kim: What are your reasons for carrying out regular survey programmes, and what is your motivation for sustaining this programme?
Cho: These voluntary surveys more often that not serve as a great motivator, as it allows one to reflect on the fundamental aspects of cities and architectures in a more timely manner. The programme has been carried out without many difficulties as the firm runs on a system designed to allow when possible for a survey or site visit once a week.
Model of Gyonam-dong
The Research Institute of Culture City
Leader | Joo Daekhan
Period of operation | Feb. 2003 – ongoing
Main programme | field study, research, exhibition, workshop
The Research Institute of Culture City is a platform led by the architects Joo Daekhan and Hong Sungchun. Formally established in 2006, its roots can be traced to 1997. Passing through a mining village in clearly in economic decline, it was possible to see how the houses that had been abandoned by former residents had become kennels for dogs. Joo Daekhan devised an exhibition entitled ‘Architecture and City Research Team in Cheoram-dong’, and presented the things he had researched for several years, in collaboration with architects who identified with his cause. At this time, the methods employed to revitalise the district were ‘rural house construction’ and ‘architecture classes’, not only in order to practice the philosophy that growing children should be sensitive to their local environments and grow up to nurture them themselves, but to improve physical residential environments.
The practice of rural house construction, which now celebrates its 19th year of operation, has evolved over many different stages. From those rural housing projects that aimed at the earliest phase of development to improve inadequate living environments, they have improved beyond recognition to propose much-needed programmes based on the actual measurements of the built environment of villages and social sciences research. Housing for elderly individuals in Cheoram-dong, Taebaek-si to the artist residencies and gallery in Yanggu-gun, and the library in Munsan-myeon, Seocheon-gun; all are spaces born from this ideation. Recently, this project has expanded into cities as well, working on sites in tandem with social movements like Gwanghwamun Square and the old train tracks of Gongdeok Station. Drawing on Joo Daekhan’s thoughts as inspiration, ‘Rural house construction is planned, fundraised, designed, and constructed by the architect himself, who then selects who will live there’; ‘as a method of realising social architecture by directly making and proposing the use and form of architecture required by society’. It can be thought of as the most practice-based platform of the many platforms in contemporary architecture, where the participants share their passion and memories’.
Another branch of the activities of the Research Institute of Culture and Cities is Architecture K-12. The architecture schooling programme, which targets children from nursery school to high school, goes beyond architects meeting with children to create spaces or projects, fostering their interest in architecture, to focus on the educational potential of architecture to stress that ‘the world can be reinterpreted and made through the lens of architecture’. As a result of sustained efforts by Architecture K-12, students from six schools of Onyang-dong, Asan-si have participated in this programme as part of a shared high school curriculum, bearing meaningful fruit the first time it was recognised as a part of the official educational programme. Presently, 30 architects passionate about the scheme are participating, with teams forming in regions like the Gangwon branch. This year, I saw an exhibition named ‘Experiment 18.25.61: From Gangjeong to Domun’. The situation of this group practicing social architecture was contrasted in my mind, and I got a curious thing that why the Research Institute of Culture City can’t be a social asset.
Book cover of Rural House Construction
Cho Junggoo was born in 1966 and raised in Bogwang-dong, Seoul. He graduated from the Department of Architecture at Seoul National University. In 2000, he founded guga urban architecture and continued to explore design along the theme of a ‘universal architecture that is close to our life’. Over the course of 20 years of wednesday survey, the architect has observed and recorded the lives of neighbourhoods and people in Seoul and continued to discover a housing of our time based on the various forms of life which encountered in his research.
