How Do Materials Reveal Meaning?
Value judgments are also embedded in the ways materials are revealed. Whereas the preceding subsection examined how experience is structured through the physical properties of materials, this subsection focuses, in addition to function and sensation, on what values such expressions reveal and how they relate to conventions.
Here, two kinds of relationships can be discerned between the selected works. One is an approach that seeks to construct, through materials and construction, an expression representing particular values. Freedom Center (1964) and The Hankyoreh Newspaper Headquarters (1991) were attempts to confer authority and identity, respectively. While the massive form of exposed concrete lent monumentality to state ideology, the rough cement finish and exposed steel frame can be read as a language expressing the orientation of a newspaper that emerged from the democratisation movement.
The other is a way of reconstructing meaning by referring to existing forms of expression. Such references draw on a resemblance to their sources and yet reflect different attitudes toward them and different degrees of distance. While the Park Soo Keun Museum (2002) connected painting and architecture through the similar textures of matière and broken granite, Cascade House (2019) brought the commonplace tastes of the residential neighbourhood into architectural expression, calling into question the aesthetic standards prevailing within architectural circles.
The four selected works do not constitute a single lineage, but they show how an interest in giving meaning to materials has appeared at different moments—from expressions that reveal state ideology and collective aims to approaches that reference painting and everyday tastes. Just as constructivist expressions once connected to aspirations for social transformation in The Hankyoreh Newspaper Headquarters were later styled as elements of commercial façades, the same materials and forms now enter different contexts.
P025 Freedom Center | Q025 How Does Concrete Represent the State? |
P026 The Hankyoreh Newspaper Headquarters | Q026 How Do Everyday and Industrial Materials Give Form to the Identity of the Press? |
P027 Park Soo Keun Museum | Q027 How Does the Texture of Stone Connect Painting and Architecture? |
P028 Cascade House | Q028 How Do Materials Signalling Taste Reinterpret the City? |
