Life+Thing
In the nineteenth-century, life was a controversial topic in architecture; Gottfried Semper introduced the concept of life to architecture and Karl Marx defined everyday life as the epicenter of revolution. Out of all human history, the contemporary age is the most fast-paced, complex, fragmented, and uncertain. For an architect to work on contemporary life as a prevailing theme, they would have to produce countless proposals that are incomplete and provisional but also persuasive. As if a never-ending pursuit towards self-affirmation and fulfillment, the work of Yang Soo-in (principal, Lifethings) is the product of the same debilitating and arduous punishments suffered by Prometheus and Sisyphus. As Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus claim, it is through endless repetition that the human transforms themself into a heroic figure who does not submit to their fate. Beginning with an analysis of a given condition and situation, the locating and conceptualisation of the problem, the efficient use of limited resources, and critical interventions in everyday life, Yang’s methodology relies heavily on micro-narratives. For Yang, there is no abstract idea or ideology, nor is there a one-fits-all solution that can be universally applied to every project. Because of this, Yang’s workload increases exponentially. However, like a strategist in control of the project, Yang clearly demarcates the content and bounds of the problem and traverses widely diverse modes of living with ease. While there is no doubt that it is Yang’s own talents and tenacity that make all of this possible, it might also be made possible owing to Korea’s unique architectural context, one that calls for quick thinking that has led Yang’s architecture to evolve in this way. Different forms have various meanings in architecture. For example, Martin Heidegger describes an architectural or environmental feature – like a bridge by a river – to be that which draws together the fourfold (Geviert: sky, earth, mortals, gods) that grounds our existence. Phenomenologists focus on the thing’s physicality or the poetics of construction, and postmodernists stress hermeneutic ambiguity to prompt the proliferation of numerous meanings. For Yang, however, a thing is something that is real. The word ‘thing’ developed from the idea of an ‘assembly’, which suggests that a thing is essentially the assembly of parts or pieces. By mediating between things, between things and people, with people in reality, and by recomposing the parts, Yang interprets architecture as a kind of a semi-autonomous play that resists compromised reality. But this is not about ‘art for art’s sake’ or the autonomy of architecture. Rather, it is about repeatedly carrying out mini-revolutions in given situations while aimlessly wandering the world in search for the possibility of freedom—in short, it is about a nomadic way of life. Sometimes, this working method prompts Yang to develop interests in the subcultures of the social fringes, the non-mainstream, and the alternative facilities.
(left) John Portman’s Hyatt Regency Atlanta (1967) / Screenshot from Portman Architects Website (right) Yang Soo-in’s Cultureland Office (2020)
The Heritage of Popular Modernism
While formally a professional facility for a private company, Cultureland Office – as a building owned by a company that is in the cultural sector – is also densely composed of a concert hall, a rental cultural facility, a café, and amenities on the lower floors aside from the workspace that is concentrated in the upper floors. After adding an outdoor balcony in the workspace for the employees, the remaining floor area ratio was used up to create a monumental spaceship-shaped party space on the rooftop garden with wonderful views. The programme composition was not preplanned but was realised after the client accepted the architect’s proposal. While small in scale, the architect designed the building to function not merely as a workplace but also as an urban cultural complex. This attempt is reminiscent of the American industrialist-architect John Portman and his Hyatt Regency Atlanta, San Francisco, and Houston designed in the 1960 – 1970s. These buildings all have spaces for culture, leisure, and conferences on the lower floors, hotel rooms on the upper floors, and a spaceship-shaped café with panoramic views on the roof. In terms of the programme composition, the urban context, and formal manipulation, the Cultureland Office reveals a similar approach. Here, the architect was not merely playing the role of a contractual designer but also the roles of a consultant, a facilitator, and a social engineer who not only plans and fabricates programmes so that they may all fit in this limited building space but also one who mediates and fosters various human relationships and demands. Not limited to physical factors such as setback regulations for daylight, district units planning, height differences in the topography, use, function, and character, and construction costs and feasibility, the architect also sought to cater to the scrupulous demands of the client, user convenience and comfort, and post-construction maintenance and use. In short, whatever was deemed relevant to the building was taken into consideration.
‘The space becomes not just a box for people, but an event. Any building is just a thing until people get there and use it. Whenever I create anything, I take a holistic approach, everything from the paintings, to the sculpture, to the furniture. You’re creating an environment for people. You can’t get away from the human interface. In the final analysis, it’s about life. It is life.’ – John Portman▼1
John Portman is an individual who is not only celebrated as a great architect who managed to revitalise an aging urban centre, thereby elevating living conditions and welfare more broadly, but also as an architect denounced for his role as a commercial developer who sold out his values for popularity. Before him, there was the architect Raymond Hood who designed the Rockefeller Center. In his Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas determined Le Corbusier to be a utopianist and Raymond Hood to be an alternative modernist and realist. Unlike that of early twentycentury European modernism, where government-led public architecture and civic infrastructure drove forward the idea of community, American modernism was led by popular culture epitomized by Coney Island and Manhattan, the market economy, liberalism, and pragmatism. When the inner contradictions of modernity were at their peak after May 1968, Koolhaas sought to respond to a fragmented contemporary society and city by partially restoring this American popular modernism through his slightlyaltered versions of Peter Eisenman’s autonomous architecture and Robert Venturi’s postmodernism. Referring to early modernist examples of Russian constructivism, Mies van der Rohe, and Corbusier, Koolhaas expanded the modern plan through technology, capital, development, megastructure, and unpredictability by willfully embracing the city’s highly dense, chaotic, and anonymous ‘nonplace’ characteristics. What he extracted from modernism, however, was the meta-discourse and ideology of the Enlightenment. As an appropriate and feasible solution proposal that is not based on any predefined categories, ethics, or abstract ideas but on cold rational analysis and problem solving, Cultureland Office upends the inner contradictions and dangers of contemporary society into creative opportunities like Koolhaas with American popular modernism. There is no naïve optimistic utopianism in the likes of Archigram, Archizoom, and Superstudio nor any anthropological appeal as found in proposals from Alison & Peter Smithsons and Jane Jacobs. Instead, there is only the practice of reason that cuts through reality with its sharply-defined concepts and indubitable facts. The architect avoids engaging with illogical propositions, unfounded ambiguities and unfathomable mythologies. While Koolhaas divided the building’s interior and exterior into separate worlds, Cultureland Office added exterior balconies per floor facing the frontal road and drew on planting design to create a close relationship between the two. The building’s front by Yeongdong-daero Road was finished with glass curtain walls on its lower floor corners, placing an emphasis on dynamic verticality by using transparent elevators, void, unaligned balconies, and bridges. For the building’s back facing Tancheon Stream, which was restricted by the setback regulation, a simple boxshaped concert hall mass and a level garden informed by the topography were positioned in response to the urban context. While the unique silk screen glass exterior might appear to be an attempt at devising a purely autonomous form, this façade design in fact alludes to the various interior and exterior-related contexts and conditions such as the client’s preference for urbanised glass curtain walls, energy efficiency, lower maintenance costs, orientation sensitive to daylight exposure, dynamic shifts in view, fostering relationships with the vicinity, and the reduction of construction costs.
▼1 Richard L. Eldredge, ‘No architect ever loved Atlanta like John Portman’, Atlanta Magazine, Jan. 2018.
(left) Manuel Aires Mateus’ Casa na Terra (2018) Image courtesy of Silent Living / ©Nelson Garrido (right) Yang Soo-in’s Botong Jip (2020)
Formless Architecture
The most distinctive feature of Botong Jip is its indifference to form— that is, its minimisation of artificial design. The building might be half-buried underground in an inclined slope because of height restrictions due to a neighboring cultural heritage site and the fact that this relatively large-scale building had to somehow be contained within 20% of the building to land ratio according to a Green Natural Area, but that does not necessarily mean that form design is out of reach. Examples of underground houses, with either an attempt at experimental form manipulation or sculptural integrity, can be found in Koolhaas’ Maison à Bordeaux, RCR Arquitectes’ Casa Rural, Manuel Aires Mateus’ Casa na Terra, and Álvaro Leite Siza’s Casa Toló. Botong Jip, on the other hand, offers a neutral impression with its plain mass positioning that matches the surrounding topography and its single-sided flat surface composition used for the building’s front façade exposed aboveground. Alongside space and design, form is one of the three core elements that define modern architecture. In modern architecture, form is psychological in terms of its apprehension and perception, and form is stripped of all external meaning—that is, it is the essence of visual perception and formal aesthetics. Form does not deliver any patent meaning and yet it pleases the observer through line, surface, light, and shadow. It is an architectural element defined by verbal silence. Mies defined form, in its most perfect realization, to be pure building that is abstracted from all non-architectural forces that influence and conflict with the architectural structure. In this context, form acts like a deterrent to maintain a critical standpoint against a secularized reality where a client’s preferences and ambitions, the market demand, and the construction conditions dominate. The distorted surface of the glass curtain wall observed in Mies’s architecture disarms the form’s internal order and authority and instead reflects the fleeting images of reality within the building. To him, form itself could not be architecture’s purpose. Likewise, Yang is also indifferent to form but in a way that differs from Mies’s critical architecture. To Yang, form is the outcome of mediating, managing, and resolving countless sociocultural variables aside from architecture. In the 2000s when Yang was living in the US, the architectural scene in America was divided between a critical scene that took architectural autonomy as a means of social critique and resistance and a post-critical scene that ridiculed its inability to communicate with society, instead turning towards architectural instrumentality. The postcritical scene, which argued that architecture should cater to the diverse demands that existed outside of architecture in line with the changing times, often emphasised the active use of market-friendly and cuttingedge technologies along with collaborative communication between various participants. While it might be too early to say, when observing his recent works it seems that Yang draws closer to this post-critical scene. Botong Jip looks like a single building from a distance, but it is actually a set of three houses. The three Houses replicate each other’s spatial composition as masses enveloping their respective inner courtyards. As the mountain slope levels out as it approaches flat land, the relationship between the underground courtyard and the entrance road of these three houses is changed. To enter house A’s inner courtyard, one needs to move half a floor up from the entrance; for House B, one must move half a floor down from the entrance; and as for House C, one must move a full floor down from the entrance. Because the levels of each inner courtyard differ, their landscaping and atmospheres also differ. While House A’s inner courtyard – which is no different from the aboveground level – has an open expanded view, House B’s inner courtyard offers an impression of shelter. Set completely underground, House C’s inner courtyard gives off a tranquil feeling regardless of climate conditions such as rain or wind. Each inner courtyard was planned differently in terms of finishing material and planting design according to the client’s preferences and demands. The buildings enveloping the courtyards were also differentiated in terms of room position and furniture composition according to family size, layout, and scale. The differentiating element in Botong Jip is not the form or space but the relationships between the inner courtyards and the site and the building and inner courtyard.
(left) Oceanus Office (2010) (right) Helinox Creative Center Busan (2023)
Between Cynicism and Hope
The Helinox Creative Center Busan (hereinafter HCC Busan) is the reuse project of a building which, after undergoing multiple changes in ownership and additions of extensions since its first approval for use in 1996, is now being used as an office and showroom for a private company. Putting aside its complex historical record, the project was like solving an extremely challenging math equation due to the range of client demands and the necessity for a diverse programme composition from work, sales, distribution, neighbourhood amenities, culture, and event. The architect approached the project like a surgeon about to engage in a highly complex operation he had never performed before. After studying the building from its most minute details and analyzing and separating out the essential and non-essential parts from one another, the architect optimised the lowerfloor ornamental staircase, cargo elevator, outdoor piloti parking lot, rooftop garden, balcony, heat exchanging facility, and other areas that required extensions by maximally drawing upon the original structure and spatial composition. For example, a situation arose where the heat exchanger – from client’s requests – was designed to be much larger than required. The enlarged pipe diameter could no longer fit inside the low ceiling height of the original building. To connect the pipes below the beams, the architect manufactured flat square pipes for areas where the pipes intersect with the structure after redrawing the facility layout to minimise interference. Simultaneously, the architect had to come up with the most optimal method of maximally reusing the original parts to minimise the need to manufacture and thereby reduce construction cost. While ordering bricks to achieve the curved exterior surface according to the client’s request, the architect limited the number of types to reduce the need for manufacture while reusing the original bricks by aligning them vertically for the outdoor piloti parking lot which had a different curvature. While the new rooftop parapet wall was mostly made with RC, to reduce weight load in areas with weak structure, the architect forged a new form with a metal mould and finished it with the same material. The way in which the parking lot’s piloti roof (which was heightened to secure ceiling height for loading and unloading vehicles) partially covers up the mechanical parking tower that is exposed aboveground while remaining connected to the backroad, as well as the way the tall plant box adjusts the right amount of sight, all appear like puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly. While there were countless other issues and problems, such as these and many that cannot be listed here, the architect managed to resolve each assignment and turn the project into a success with an enormous amount of effort and patience. HCC Busan began as a simple reuse project of the building exterior, and yet, as problems were resolved and ideas became reality, the project ended up as a mega project of five times the original investment. This would have been impossible without complete faith in the architect. Like an archaeological cross-section of ancient bedrock, the histories and traces left by the various people who came and went can be found fossilized in this building. Instead of hiding or stressing these traces, the architect chose to reveal them simply as they are. Aside from an ability to evoke poetic and romanticised sentiments of nostalgia, preservation of past traces can also mean structure stabilisation via minimal changes, building waste, and construction costs from a more utilitarian standpoint. Without any overall hierarchical order, the constituting parts of HCC Busan interact with one another in a sequential relationship and create a topical relationship nexus. By fixing a new structure on the original framework, unresolved points of conflict and their dynamic tension were therefore created prompt the observer to ponder questions and expand the horizon of interpretation. This unfinished ambiguity is rarely found in Yang’s previous works. Along with his deep fondness for and interest in reuse projects, the architect considers reuse not only as a timely task for the current era facing climate crisis and low growth, but also as a challenge that can bring about a revolution in the architectural practice and methods. If feminism, human rights, ecology, peace, and New Social Movement were the ethical stances and doctrines of the 1960s, today’s interest in environment and society – whether in the form of micro-narratives or meta-discourses – provides us with a new vision. Our task today is to drop our old habits of doubt and cynicism toward synthesis and to begin exploring the future.
Cultureland Office
You can see more information on the SPACE No. 667 (June 2023).
