Between Invisible Practice and Giving: Jang Wonseok
photographed by
Kim San (unless otherwise indicated)
edited by
Kim Hyerin
SPACE March 2026 (No. 700)
I AM AN ARCHITECT
‘I am an Architect’ was planned to meet young architects who seek their own architecture in a variety of materials and methods. What do they like, explore, and worry about? And how are architects in various regions expanding their own worlds in different ways? SPACE is going to discover individual characteristics of them rather than group them into a single category.
Architectural models at the office of HaeSeok Architects
interview Jang Wonseok Principal, HaeSeok Architects × Kim Hyerin
Living, Teaching, and Learning
Kim Hyerin (Kim): Since opening HaeSeok Architects (hereinafter HaeSeok) in Sejong in 2018, you have continued to operate your practice there.
Jang Wonseok (Jang): I didn’t have any prior connection to Sejong. I’m originally from Busan, and I studied and worked in Seoul. In 2014, I relocated to Sejong due to my wife’s job, and I ended up working on the interior design of our own home. Until then, I had mainly worked on large-scale, competition-oriented projects and therefore I had almost no understanding of how interior construction processes worked or how much they cost. It was my first time trying it. During that process, I felt like I was no longer someone who built architecture, but someone who drew drawings. I started questioning what kind of professional I was and could really be. So, I made a bold decision to move down to Sejong and establish a different kind of architectural practice. I didn’t open my office immediately as I felt that I lacked enough hands-on experience, so I worked at another local office in Sejong while studying and learning more. After that, I opened my own office.
Material samples at the office of HaeSeok Architects
Kim: Along with your current practices as an architect, you also work as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Architecture at Chungnam National University (CNU). What messages do you hope to convey to students?
Jang: Honestly, I think I gain more from the students. They haven’t studied architecture for very long but their imaginations are incredibly rich. They want to do so much and have strong ambition, but they’re just unfamiliar with the methods. It feels strange to claim I’m ‘teaching’ the...
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Jang Wonseok
Jang Wonseok is an architect who aspires to be a person who is ‘outwardly gentle, and inwardly composed’, yet is ‒ both personally and architecturally ‒ still in a state of fermentation: outwardly soft, but internally intensely obsessive. He finds deep satisfaction in observing a single theme over a long period of time and, through repetitive processes of transformation, barely gathering thoughts that might otherwise scatter and turning them into architectural substance. He is deeply absorbed in the paradoxical question of ‘how to be cool without looking like you’re trying to be cool.’
