SPACE February 2025 (No. 687)
Ornament is Sublime, Ionic Ring (2023) An extension of the concept of ‘souvenirs’, this piece reinterprets architectural ornamentation as bodily adornments (accessories), miniaturising Ionic and Doric column capitals into ring forms. As both an accessory and a playful rebuttal to Adolf Loos’s manifesto ‘Ornament and Crime’, the work suggests that ornamentation, scrubbed from buildings, finds new vitality when placed on the human body as its stage. ©HYPERSPANDREL
(Really) Green Roof (2023) A submission to the Seoul MARU Public Intervention competition, inspired by the materials and scenery commonly found on rooftops in Korea. Highlighting the fact that Seoul MARU is, after all, a rooftop, the project humorously explores new possibilities for public intervention by using the green urethane paint frequently seen on rooftops as a large chroma key. ©HYPERSPANDREL
Deeply Personal Yet Ultimately Impersonal
Conducting interviews with the architects of the Harbinger Project was perplexing, as they were not to be tied to a familiar nor to a a singular language. True to the titles of the discussions – ‘Their Dual Codes’, ‘Off-Centre Approaches’, and ‘In Search of Lost Languages’ – they encompass both ‘this’ and ‘that’, diverge from what is established, or collect unknown languages. Each individual’s architectural interests traverse Korea-west, context-function, reality-quality, architecture-building, completeness-incompleteness, locality-individuality, mainstream-marginal, virtuality, ornamentation, collective memory, time, femininity, and multiplicity, but in truth, they belong to none. Their work overlaps or contrasts with that of Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe, Aldo Rossi, Enric Miralles, Antoni Gaudí, and Lina Bo Bardi, but only in fragments. They have an abundance of narratives...
