In recent years, I have often been asked whether SPACE has adopted an editorial focus trained on primarily covering small-scale buildings. However, the scope of a building is not a criterion in our selection of works. Recalling that the projects published in the past 700 volumes of SPACE have always engaged in dialogue with the architectural community of their time, the aforementioned stance is well founded. This article traces and examines the content that has been identified and discussed in SPACE over the past 7 to 8 years. It recounts the narratives and questions that remain relevant today.
●1 PROJECT ‘Jong-Am Square – Simplex Architecture’, SPACE 644 (July 2021), pp. 46 – 55.
●2 FRAME ‘Architecture as a Background of Daily Life: Leeon Architects’, SPACE 628 (Mar. 2020), pp. 36 – 71.
The Increase in Ordinary Public Architecture
A significant number of the small-scale public buildings published in SPACE appeared alongside a series of changes prompted by the enactment of the Building Service Industry Promotion Act in 2013. Forms and spaces that departed from more conventional approaches appeared in ordinary public facilities, such as residents’ autonomous centres, facilities for the elderly and children, and safety centres. Furthermore, combinations of sites and programmes that were previously considered to be unusual or extraordinary, such as creating public spaces beneath elevated structures●1 or building small libraries within parks●2, have become examples that enhance the dignity of urban spaces while attending closely to the lived experience of citizens.
During monthly peer review sessions in SPACE, where architects and critics examine submitted projects, it is often remarked upon that the level of completion of the submissions is exceptionally high within the conditions of public architecture▼1. This demonstrates the extreme difficulty of upholding a commitment to the core concepts proposed at the competition stage through to the final details of finish. Examples of public architecture that have received attention to date, regardless of building scope, tend to be the result of collaborative planning between the public and private sectors, as well as the exceptional efforts of multiple agents.●3 Despite scrupulous consideration of public architecture at every stage over the past decade, from planning to operation, and a shift in awareness regarding everyday environments, it remains questionable whether a reality in which a high level of completion that can only be secured through exceptional conditions and sacrificial efforts is healthy. Simultaneously, from a design point of view, it is hard not to notice that the forms and elements of successful examples are increasingly being repeated over time. Perhaps we have now reached a point where new criteria are needed to better observe how publicness and public relations function.
●3 FEATURE ‘Design Competitions: Tracing a Decade-long Trajectory’, SPACE 672 (Nov. 2023), pp. 28 – 135.
Opening Up a Mass Market for Architecture
Prolonged warfare, unstable domestic and international political and economic conditions, as well as other factors, have, in recent years, driven construction costs ever higher, resulting in frequent reports of many private projects being delayed or halted. As recently as 2 or 3 years ago, numerous café and stay projects were submitted to SPACE. At the height of that phenomenon, a FEATURE titled ‘The Café Phenomenon’●4 explored the increasingly diverse forms of café arc...
