SPACE April 2025 (No. 689)
미네랄 하우스(2024) ⓒKim Hyoukjoon
When looked at from the viewpoint of desire, the majority of architecture is governed by a dramatic gesture, as if it were desperate to flaunt itself to its city audience. However, there are a few exceptional cases that calm the currents of desire and disappear into the background of their surroundings. In very rare instances, one discovers an architecture that fully embraces changes in the qi (vital force) of nature by opening itself to nature, becoming weathered with age and so revealing its coming state of extinction. The architecture of Jeong Jaeheon (professor, Kyung Hee University) is an example of the ‘rare’ latter style, a space for experimentation and the expression of a unique Korean sentiment attuned to nature and exploration.
Having studied under Henri Ciriani and Michel Kagan in France, Jeong began his practice guided by a strong formalist tendency. Later, his spatial and material expressions met the design approach of Louis Kahn, who composed a new combination of rooms by fundamentally exploring the reason for their existence. It has now reached a state reminiscent of Geoffrey Bawa’s architecture, which seeks an architecture capable of assimilation in nature, alert to the changes in the qi of nature and the precarity of existence: in other words, it is transforming into an architecture of the ultimate, which percolates across nature.
By inviting an experience of architecture through the sensing body by pursuing carefully calibrated proportions, Jeong has spent his career designing those places that exist on the margins of life, where people can feel most at ease in their relationship with nature. In other words, he composes an incisive architecture which adopts the constraint of geometric form, and advances an ‘architecture with a margin’ that promotes a connection between nature and the interior and exterior spaces. He connects the courtyard with the fresh air outside by cleverly exploiting the flow of the slope, and seeks to synthesise perceptions through purposeful movement. Emphasising the layout of a site and capturing minute changes on a slope are key features of Korean architecture. He creates a static ‘mise-...
