[ESSAY] Open Ending | KimNam Architects

SPACE March 2026 (No. 700)

 

 

 

 

The History of a Site​ 

Every site has a history. In most cases, that history is either erased or forgotten when ownership changes. However, all the projects we designed and realised between 2023 and 2025 were buildings for entities that had operated on their respective sites for a long time. More than half of them were the winning projects from design competitions, suggesting that our strengths lie in projects where we genuinely engage with the specific context.

 

I (here, ‘I’ refer to both Kim Jinhyu and Nam Hojin) don’t believe that everything is beautiful, nor that everyone must agree on what is beautiful. I do find, however, that often there are things that at one time I find unappealing which gradually come to feel beautiful the longer I look and think about them. These cases are more compelling.

 

Not everything old deserves respect; knowing what to discard is also a virtue. I enjoy change. It takes courage to respect something that wasn’t necessarily meant to be respected long term, or to refuse to respect what everyone says should be respected. Yet, once you gain empathy for such a stance, the project gains a powerful momentum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the start of 2023, our first project was a proposal from a design competition for two workers’ facilities (cargo lounges) within the Incheon International Airport cargo terminal. We had to place a 500m2 building at the centre of a parking lot spanning several thousand square metres. The cargo warehouses dominating the site were not built for visual pleasure, nor did they express any sense of local identity. They could have stood anywhere in the world. We thought this absence of context would free us up to design forms as we wished. However, we were wrong; every scheme we drew felt arbitrary and hollow.

 

Although, after a while, it began to take on a certain beauty. The vast artificial zone created by reclamation, the perfectly cut plots lined with massive warehouses, the endless flow of boxes traveling on conveyors beneath long-span structures, the white light filtering through skylights and space frames: there was something quietly moving about this area and its architecture. The monumental scale found in something that was never meant to be a monument was quite moving.
The beauty discovered in the logistics warehouses became the DNA determining our proposed convenience facility: squareness, slenderness, sparseness, the height, largeness, technology-oriented, and efficiency. While a few characteristics alone do not complete a work of architecture, I believed this building could emerge safely as a continuation of the cargo terminal’s history. This proposal resonated with the judges, ...

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