The latest instalment of our new series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
In this week’s reading list, which takes Korea as its focus, Hyungmin Pai speaks of the interconnected crises – climate change, the digital divide and widespread rampant inequality – to which criticism must find itself directed. For him, criticism must ‘become a part of its own dissolvable redistribution’. Byoung Soo Cho’s writing on the informal directness of mak and poignant vacancy of bium addresses how these two concepts, inherent in traditional Korean architecture, remain present – through less apparent – as an emotive backdrop to contemporary Korean identity.
A co-housing project, slotted into a small plot in the dense Songpa-gu district in Seoul, showcases how an intensely urban and collaborative way of living can exist with a social value. The pockets of Victorian England left in Seoul are explored by Alfred Hwangbo, Philip Christou delves into Siza’s rich work with Kim Jong Kyu and Colin Marshall takes a look at One O One’s initiative to develop the South Korean island of Gapado.
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Critical distance: redistributing Korean criticism, Hyungmin Pai, AR July/August 2020
‘the agency of criticism, as that of architecture, lies not in its status as a separate discipline but as part of a relation of ideas, material and spaces’
Mak and bium: imperfection and emptiness in Korean aethetics, Byoung Soo Cho, AR February 2018
‘Like sombre statues from long ago, a tangibility invites those who encounter them to sense intimately the soul of the building’
Britain in Seoul: The path to Korean modernity, Alfred Hwangbo, AR February 2018
‘Following Korea’s independence in 1945, the Stone Palace remains as a testament to the country’s turbulent history’
Pleasure island: a remote Gapado remodelled, Colin Marshall, AR May 2020
‘The Gapado project’s long-term goals include bringing back some of its population lost to the vortex of Seoul, after the decline of local agricultural and fishery industries’
Remote control: Álvaro Siza in South Korea, Philip Christou, AR December 2019
‘Siza’s projects are known for their sensitive and delicate responses to the spatial and often social conditions of the site. They are topographical’
Micro scope: Songpa Micro-Housing in Seoul, South Korea by SsD, Eleanor Beaumont, AR November 2017
‘Outside, a skin of twisted metal fins shimmers and pulses up the building, sculpted around the ground-floor columns and wending backwards around the roof terraces to allow sunlight down into the plot’
Kim Swoo Geun (1931-1986), Melany Sun-min Park, AR February 2018
‘It is not surprising that Kim maintained an uneasy relationship with Korean aesthetics and ideas about tradition. He sought out a confluence of patrimony and progress, searching for a national aesthetic without a traditional blueprint’
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