Something Korean

New Museum in New York by SANAA was the first hurdle in my two-year race of assistance for one editorial team of a major Korean architectural medium. To my untrained eye, this seemed to be just several white angular twisted boxes interlocking up and down along the height - but oddly enough it seemed to be entertaining both its client and on-lookers. SANAA received a Pritzker prize later, so my l..

Here’s an irony about hanok, Korean traditional house. Some Hanok may ask for timely renovation in 70-80 years, while others are just not so ready, with the outside timber firmly standing upon concave cubic rock bases. Hanok of yesterday: The modern rectangular site, since developed, were divided into multiple lots, each for an urban style hanok. One of our mission: retrieve some old-time elegan..

An impressive number of waterfront developments in Europe are half riverside. The by-the-water beaches are full of people enjoying warmth and sunshine from their deck chairs. The rest work as commercial, industrial and sustainable sea port and pathways. Here we present some of the most successful European examples of waterfront developments from a fine Korean language book titled “Essays on Land..

Every year in August including this year(2023)’s, Saemangeum is holding a festival of K-pop. More info is available on its homepage. Both for professional architects and other involved parties, it’s good to realize more than ever that this kind of initiative is necessary for big waterfront spaces such as this. It was a long time coming though. According to South Korea’s architecture medium Space..

In the new Songeun Building for art exhibition designed by Herzog & de Meuron, an inside ramp connects the parking space and walking space. The partly plywood board facade to the Dosan Daero is very tall, with steep angled triangular shape, and two narrow vertical (strict and ornamental at the same time) windows facing the street are totally open to the sunlight. Its difference is not to be in c..

You can compare The Spider Grandmother of the American Navajo and Hopi, with this book’s author Hugh Casson, who became a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge in 1928. He became a prestigious Director of Architecture for the Festival of Britain at 38, in 1951. A prolific architect, he made a bestseller out of his book Hugh Casson’s Oxford. As with it, in Hugh Casson’s Cambridge he has saved bi..