SPACE December 2025 (No. 697)
On the 7th of November, 2025, as part of the 25th anniversary exhibition ‘fiction non fiction’ by guga urban architecture (principal, Cho Junggoo), a book talk programme took place. The event featured Cho Junggoo, Chung Dahyoung (co-director, CAC), and Kim Jonghun (professor, Pai Chai University). Together, they reviewed guga urban architecture’s 25-year practice, the meanings behind their work, and how these ideas were brought together in the exhibition.
The old Goo Yeong-sook Pediatric Hospital, the venue for ‘fiction non fiction’
The Expansion and Transformation of the Madang in Step with Everyday Life
The event began with a presentation by Kim Jonghun (professor, Pai Chai University), titled ‘Reading the Madang with the Body, Making a House with the Heart: a Frugal Architect Cho Junggoo’s Sensory Design Practice’. As the title suggests, he analysed guga urban architecture (principal, Cho Junggoo, hereinafter guga)’s architectire through the lens of the madang (courtyard), a dominent theme that penetrates both the exhibition and the architectural pratice.
Specificially, by highlighting the ‘wednesday survey’, a weekly urban fieldwork project that has run over 1,100 times, Kim Jonghun interpreted guga’s notion of the madang in its larger context—the urban scale. ‘For Cho Junggoo, alleyways are the madangs of the neighbourhood, and these countless alleys observed through these surveys have become the inspiration for the many Madang-jip that he has designed.’ In this way, Kim Jonghun read guga’s architectural journey as a process of continuous experimentation with the concept of the madang.
A notable example is Gahoe-dong, Yangyudang (2011), a renovation project where Cho Junggoo’s ‘spatial frugality’ is most evident. In this case, though the GFA (gross floor area) was reduced after remodeling, the space became more efficient and tightly organised. It was achieved by the architect’s refined spatial measurement and rational judgment, cultivated through years of weekly surveys.
In later works, the madang further expanded inwards and upwards. For instance, in the Cheonyeon-dong Hanok (2016) project, the architect tried to create a ‘a madang functioning as a living room’ by reinterpreting the traditional composition. In this new type of madang, a daechung (main wooden hall) was integrated to take the function of a kitchen and an atrium was inserted into part of the madang. Kim Jonghun evaluated this as restoring the madang’s original role as a communal space.
Kim Jonghun continued introd...
