SPACE November 2024 (No. 684)
©BCHO Partners
Architect Cho Byoungsoo has much to say. This means he has a great many stories. They include discussing favourite projects; disquisitions on what defines his architecture himself; his birth in 1957; the way the yard from his childhood is imprinted on his memory; his ambivalence toward the architecture he experienced in the West and East of the U.S. and Europe; his contemplation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching; consideration of the spontaneous and improvisational aesthetic of rough maksabal bowls; and one’s relationship to a site. Despite this roving eye, he returns to these stories again and again, so that they come to form archetypes. The difference is that he is also a maker, and as he creates more work, these stories are renewed, reconnected, and continue to expand beyond their boundaries.
Re-born architecture is a useful way of understanding his architecture. Carrying out project work from his graduate school studio, he is said to have insisted on placing a project underground when working on the Lugano City Development Museum (1990, Switzerland), or cutting up part of an existing building instead of demolishing it in the Boston City Open-air Theater (1990, U.S.), and working to reveal the traces of history and present a new sense of space in the Montreal Maritime Museum (1989, Canada), against the wishes of his tutor who favoured the installation of a new building. His first project after returning to Korea, Studio House, Seongbuk-Dong (1996, Seoul), was also an example of re-born architecture, convertig a Japanese-style house into an architectural office by cutting out unnecessary structures ...
