SPACE February 2025 (No. 687)
Chon Jaewoo principal, HYPERSPANDREL & Jeong Haewook co-principal, Midday × Suh Jaewon principal, aoa architects
The Korean and the Western
Suh Jaewon (Suh): The works of HYPERSPANDREL and Midday distinguish themselves from the recent trend of so-called ‘fancy architecture’, which focuses on colour, light, materiality, emotion, and finish. Instead, their work places greater emphasis on discourse, leaning towards more conceptual and avant-garde approaches. Chon Jaewoo, whether intentionally strategic or not, does not reject but rather embraces the realities of our world—perhaps influenced by the fact that he did not grow up in Korea. Despite their experiences at David Chipperfield Architects (hereinafter DCA), a firm renowned for producing high-quality, commercially viable modern architecture, Oh Yeonjoo and Jeong Haewook have taken a different approach to interior design. Rather than employing a refined method of concealing various elements, they opt to expose and accentuate each component, creating a sense of thickness and solidity.
Jeong Haewook (Jeong): The commonalities between HYPERSPANDREL and Midday can be summarised in two points: the pursuit of idea-based architecture and the acceptance of Korea’s chaotic reality.
Chon Jaewoo (Chon): There was a central question in the architectural education I received, which was ‘is architecture without ideas truly architecture?’ I immigrated to Canada at the age of nine, and I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo and my master’s degree at Harvard GSD. After graduating, I lived in Canada for about three more years before moving to China. The Coronavirus Disease-19 pandemic brought me unexpectedly back to Korea. Over the years, I have been referred to as Korean-Canadian, making myself of a hybrid being. It also means I am an outsider wherever I go. The sense of being an outsider and the instability that comes with that feels closer to me than being Korean of having a Korean identity. The excessive competition and the high suicide rates suggest that the anxiety long inherent in Koreans resonates well with my own anxiety as an outsider. When the pandemic swept across...
