SPACE October 2025 (No. 695)
The second iteration of ‘The Revival of Korean Architecture Criticism’, organised by Seoul Architecture Forum, was held on the 28th of August at the office building of Junglim Architecture. The two critics, Lee Dammy and Park Junghyun, used archiromaky and apparat-c as the subject matter for critique. While this event did not lead to conclusive answers to questions such as ‘How one should define criticism?’ and ‘In so far as there is an architectural criticism, how can one speak of its restoration?’, however, it identified new and currently possible critical approaches as well as outlining their limitations. Editor
From left to right: Lee Sewoong, Choi Yeonyung, Park Junghyun, Yim Jinsoo, Lee Dammy, Hyun Myungseok. ©Lee Sowoon
‘Contaminating’ by ‘Metamorphosis’
With the title ‘The Problem of Metamorphosis’, Lee Dammy (principal, Flora and Fauna) – assuming diverse roles such as architect, client, and non-human – chose to ‘contaminate’ the single-track narrative that heroises architects by admitting a more chaotic imaginative space, coincidence, and fiction.
The word ‘metamorphosis’ is most immediately reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis(1915) presenting the insect as beneath the human. However, in the post-Kafka literary world, insects are no longer dismissed but celebrated or treated as no different from humans. Instead of using it as a device to metaphorically represent human beings as non-humans, metamorphosis is now welcomed as a ‘volitional change into another being’. To loosely connect this with Lee’s idea of ‘a will to learn new things through not knowing’, Lee as architect willfully decides to transform into beings that she does not know: ‘the client, the co-workers, the collaborators, the passers-by, and the building that witnesses everything’. To add something special about Lee aside from her status as an architect [if we could boldly infer from Park Junghyun (editor-in-chief, Labyrinths)’s designation of himself as a ‘heterosexual middle-a...
