Because we understand identity to be no longer singular or even clearly delineated by traditional categories, contemporary life mediates an experience which is neither here nor there, neither distinctly contained by nor attributable to any particular culture. In architecture, notions of collage and juxtaposition have become inadequate in responding to this increasingly ambiguous ide of space which outpaces simple readings or ideological binaries. We might inspect the work of architects who reference and augment broad assortments of ideas from various cultural backgrounds to create buildings, particularly Korean architect Byoungsoo Cho, whose office, BCHO, has built a number of projects across South Korea. In this essay, I evaluate several of Cho’s methods to expand of the discipline itself extensively incorporating sources from personal experiences in South Korea, the United States and Europe to craft an architecture of multicultural simultaneity. I argue that the results of this convergence suggest a concept of multiculturalism grounded in cultural memory, contextual materiality and geographic siting, suggesting that Cho’s work asserts a poignantly contemporary engagement of culture as a medium for design. I propose that the breadth and enmeshed quality of these references results in a productive ambiguity, challenging otherwise dogmatic understandings identity. I surmise that Cho’s work is noteworthy as a the extant conditions of various contexts while challenging our presuppositions about the world around us.
Architecture is a medium inflected upon by its contexts, creators and inhabitants like any other creative pursuit. It anticipates and ultimately reflects the concerns of the constituencies involved in its conception. In an increasingly connected global community, we can expect that architecture, too, should resemble the multicultural nature of contemporary life. We tend to envisage the space of this multiculturalism as a heterogeneity in which we encounter a variety of distinct cultures, tangled by collage into spatial simultaneity. The experience of this mishmash is inherently direct, each individual culture clearly delineated. It is semeiotic in its exposition of signifying cultural tokens, each belonging singularly to a particular nation or identity. Though this form of representational multiculturalism functioned until recently without issue, it appears ever more unfit to contain the ambiguous complexity of a contemporary world in which the static boundaries of the nation-state no longer capture the soft, amoebic shape of human identity. This discrepancy between the permeability of global identity and the rigid methods of architecture necessitates a recalibration of how buildings can address the interconnectedness of our world to manifest truly multicultural spaces. What qualities confer a space of multiculturality? How does the experience of such spaces alter our relationship with existence both reflexively onto ourselves and externally towards others? While disciplinary scholarship around alterity and intersectionality has grown considerably, a careful examination of recent work reveals noteworthy examples of practicing architects whose careers interrogate questions of place, history and identity out in the field. In particular, South Korea provides an intriguing environment for the development of these prerogatives due to its historical proximity with external powers – be they China, Japan or the United States – and a recent history marked by the expatriation abroad of a significant number of its citizens. The country’s contemporary period has therefore been one predicated uniquely on a condition of hybridity that presages current interests in such subjects in other countries by several decades.
Of exceptional interest is the work of Byoungsoo Cho, whose eponymously named office, BCHO, has realized a number of culturally significant projects across the county. These comprise a breadth of buildings, from cultural spaces to private residents and theoretical proposals, all of which speculate on a fundamental level about how architecture might navigate a continuously more intertwined cultural landscape. The power of Cho’s work is dualistic. Though he presents an astonishing faculty for synthesizing various references, it is ultimately in their capacity to negotiate the architect’s personal history with larger societal forces that the office’s projects become markedly poignant. The phenomenological quality of BCHO’s work is deeply empathetic, each building engrossing its occupants in a gentle symphony of materials, forms and historical sources which challenge singular readings and overcome otherwise pedestrian expectations of function. The architecture is decidedly enigmatic in its materiality, presence and emotive quality – neither transparent nor opaque, stoic nor verbose, here nor there. Cho’s projects are enlivened not simply by meaningful multiculturality or thoughtful design sensibility but the tension with which each negotiates contemporary identity. The work leverages medium-specific attributes architecture itself to create an intensely ambiguous quality where multiculturalism is phrased less as a collage of elements than a referential intersectionality. The references in question allude to any number of architectural precedents, historical memories or cultural signifiers in a particular site or program and result in in spaces of both juxtaposition and synthesis which defy traditional categorization. Because the projects subsist on Cho’s personal experiences in Korea, the United States and Europe, each is distinctly international yet firmly grounded in the soil on which it stands. The office’s architecture thus seamlessly arbitrates domestic influences with pertinent work in Japan, the United States and Europe. A project for the revitalization of a factory warehouse in Busan, for instance, may speak in equal parts to its industrial heritage, Cho’s understanding of European architectural Modernity and the identity of a capriciously gentrifying city. At every turn, BCHO’s oeuvre expounds this laminal precipice between the cultural and personal, the identifiable and wordlessly indescribable.
Cho’s buildings advocate for an extensive multiculturalism, emergent in equal parts from both the structures’ own histories – be they those of a site, client or particular material palette – and the designer’s personal understanding of architecture. The act of unthreading the various cultures, histories and journeys that compound across BCHO’s work is an acknowledgement of a conceptual background inclined towards intertwining several ideas about building, site and culture simultaneously without distinction or hierarchy. It suggests an empathic idea of space that existing between the authorship and the historic or geological specificities that define a site before architectural intervention. Thus, multiculturalism in Cho’s work is less a binaristic intersection of two cultures (or hodgepodge collage of many) than an engrossing experience of convalescence between various, sometimes contradictory, forces. For instance, while many of the projects present a material palette calibrated decisively through European Modernism, their overall design character is arbitrated by understandings of context and spatial organization which Cho asserts are distinctively Korean. The result of this architectural entanglement attests to the complexity of identity in our contemporary world, whereby projects beguile straightforward identification. In framing the work conceptually, Cho’s intentionally ambiguous disposition towards source material necessitates a recalibration of how we discuss cultural production.
Cho melds personal experiences from his travels and education into the buildings themselves, fostering a technique of collaborative work that mirrors a meaningfully personal endeavor to a degree matched by few others. BCHO’s projects derive architectural form as much from typical forces shaping project outcomes, such as project management, client and budget, as from Cho’s personal experiences. Because of this, it is inadequate to conceptualize Cho’s method without considering his studies in the United States at the University of Montana and Harvard University in consecutive periods between 1982-86 and 1988-91, where student projects reveal an early interest cultural entanglement as a mechanism for giving form to space. A proposal from Cho’s graduate studies for a Korean cultural center in Boston demonstrates a distinctly interwoven character between a Korean spatial typology and a more conventionally Western materialization, for example. Though rendered often in a stark contrast of bold concrete and wood, the ambitions in these early works belie trends annunciated later in built work. On examination, the projects reveal fascinations with traditional forms, such as the Madang courtyard typology of traditional Korean Hanok homes and incorporate wide-ranging references often carefully contoured into the designs’ basic concept. This ideology is essential to Cho’s work, where the treatment of reference and meaning are consistently held in consistent tension with a somewhat European sensibility of abstraction and autonomy, perhaps owing to Cho’s time on exchange at the ETH in Zürich. Thus the quality of an ambiguous spatiality is critical in articulating the idiosyncratic nature of Cho’s position towards multiculturalism, because it suggests an understanding of our contemporary world that is primarily concerned with entanglement and messiness over exposition or overt reference. BCHO’s vast array of constructed projects across Korea subsume the culturally intersectional essence of their surroundings not by indulging in vacant Postmodern reference but through speculation about a complex, international mode of being defined by the recognition that a return to an ostensibly purer state of any culture prior to modernity is futile. The work accepts and actively advocates for the post-colonial identity of contemporary Korea, coalescing well into a body of global architectural work in the postwar period that considers questions of multiculturalism as central to its raison d'être.
This paper will grapple with the complexity of the office’s work in three clear but not inherently antonymous categories: memory, material and site. These categories are seldom strictly bound in Cho’s projects but fluid and capricious. A choice of material may speak not only to its innate qualities but to the meaningful way by which it interacts with a site’s history, thus enmeshing pure tactility with wider issues of cultural significance. Buildings are rendered in Cho’s oeuvre not as discrete things but as gradated, blurry experiences that exist in the world someplace between themselves and the space of a city or culture. This ambivalence is intentional and remarkable pricelessly for its capacity to navigate budget, client wishes and intensive engagement with program . The projects do not avoid these constraints but rather embrace them as another component fundamental to the complexity of architecture. Cho’s aptitude to mediate these abstract considerations imbues the work in a conceptual sense with yet another level of multiculturality because it seeks exclusively to manifest the phenomenal possibilities of a radical architecture at a level of experience simultaneously evoking both the personal and communal.
As much as the projects dwell on architectural prerogatives which skew towards the abstract, they are formed atop a rigorous conceptual understructure of historic understandings probing the contextual and personal forces that make space meaningful. This attributive breadth of Cho’s work is unique for its triangulation around site, history and memory. While a number of contemporary architects work fluently in a similar set of disciplinary references, few leverage the vocabulary as critically. Cho’s projects thus surpass simple mimesis to a degree unseen in many of his contemporaries, incorporating the architect’s broad range of influences in a manner demonstrating both dutiful study and intellectual thrift. This aptitude is particularly valuable in an age defined by the seemingly endless abundance of reference material on the internet, which wielded carelessly risks a reductive flattening of complex spatial ideas and intimate cultural histories to mere image. Where many designers tend to treat this bountiful availability of cultural source material as a smörgåsbord to be mined at the designer’s behest, Cho is exacting in his use of history as a medium through which to construct an argument about place and personhood. Citations in Cho’s work aspire to evoke more than the superficial signifiers of architectural Postmodernism. They transcend the ephemeral tedium of image-making which defines so much of architectural practice in the digital age and ask us through their delicate use of historical form and cultural critique to question the assumptions about space, inhabitation and heritage that predicate our present.
Cho’s architecture articulates an embodied experiential richness capable of spurring occupants to reevaluate their surroundings, though it is reticent in suggesting particular readings. His projects create this space of exploration by decentering typical expectations of use and efficiency in order to posit alternative understandings of architecture. Many such understandings take form as a manifestation of the innumerable constituent perspectives that define a given space in contemporary existence. They articulate this intersection between subjectivity and building with a rigor that challenges obvious relationships or otherwise stale hierarchies, ultimately demonstrating architecture’s adeptness to create spaces which remove us from the complacency of one’s own singular existence. These spaces of multiplicity, be they material, programmatic or contextual in their character, entice us to consider not only other ways of being but the very aspects of history and culture that predicate our own navigation of cosmopolitan life.
Cho’s understanding of identity and culture is grounded foremost in memory. From student work into various built projects, this interest manifests in the examination of how architectural space functions at the level of cultural medium. Which things are remembered, how they are inscribed into a particular cultural ethos and how their stories are passed forward are fundamental lenses with which the projects probe architecture’s capability to describe and inflect upon social values. Because the office’s work incorporates a broad conceptual basis that synthesizes a number of architectural considerations, projects often slip sinuously between the emotional and the critical. The resulting condition of such an architecture is unique for its capacity to leverage from a full breadth of the architectural aspects, be they siting, history, form and materiality to name only a few. The projects are neither heavy handed nor vapid but frolic in this interstitial space where the architecture itself challenges us to reconsider site, context and the very ways by which the a building comes to be. This is exceedingly clear in Cho’s 1993 proposal for partial conservation of the Japanese General Government Building.
The proposal is terse, austere in its architectural intervention. Like so many of the architect’s projects, it is neither blithely disregards nor acquiesces entirely to its site but instead engages a conversation with both the reality of its history and the possibility of speculative future. Undertaken as a theoretical proposal for the repurposing of the building once housing the colonial administration of the Japanese Empire at located in the forecourt of Gyeongbokgung Palace at the urban center of Seoul, Cho suggests a selective removal of Government building’s superstructure, leaving only the structure’s foundation as a scar incised into palace’s forecourt. In this way, the intervention literalizes the imposition of the building into its historic site while partially emancipating the palace’s famous gate from its visual imposition. Though by doing so it removes the presence of the structure along the approach to Gwanghwamun – thereby soothing its dominating imperial presence along the city’s central avenue – the project is pointedly unsatisfied with entirely erasing the architectural legacy of colonization at such a prominent location. Cho nevertheless refuses to acquiesce the functional space of the forecourt, making us of the imprint of the administrative building as if to remind us that history is stubborn to let space relinquish its memory. The design problematizes this very act of architectural erasure undertaken by the city in 1995, positing that the foundations are irremovable from the history of the city and its people. It implies that the legacy of such structures is more burdensome than their mere material presence, grounded rather literally in the identity of a place and therefore incapable of superficial removal from the understanding of both a site’s history and the culture of those around it.
What the proposal chooses to conserve of the building it encloses beneath in a sheet of glass, as if dissecting it from its surroundings in a manner wholly material yet completely transparent. This tenacity of glass to physically divide two spaces while permitting visual connection gives the remaining foundation the quality less of a ruin than a museum object, carefully presented at an intentional distance from tactile apprehension. At once literally objectifying what it retains of the Government Building, the glass surface Cho lays atop the substructure also estranges us, the audience, from its architectural space beneath. The impression the building beneath its glass enclosure is incapable of administering any of its colonial functions, bureaucratic or symbolic. Leaving what remains of its foundation as a surreal urban object, the project seemingly functions more at the level of surreal sculpture than traditional architecture.
The design considers contemporary existence to be intricately ensnarled in a history of domination and subjugation. It understands our world to be one in which various conditions of interdependence and hybridity are incapable of disentanglement from cultural identity after centuries of colonial expansion. Although Japan’s imperial rule over Korea ended officially in 1945, the Gyeongbokgung project stipulates that post-colonial identity cannot simply elude an extensive past of oppression. It challenges any notion that the oppressor be absolutely extricated from the identity of the oppressed, positing that after several generations of suppression and a fervent campaign of cultural imperialism the identity of Seoul itself is indivisibly entangled with that of its oppressor. Moreover, Cho opines that this history cannot be wantonly erased in an effort to restore what might be considered a culturally singular understanding of place. While the destruction of the General Government Building in 1996 was ultimately successful in removing the one of the most prominent interventions of Japanese Imperialism on the cityscape of Seoul, it did little to address the complexity and mourning of a country that was left culturally beleaguered, impoverished and essentially bisected in the aftermath of a prolonged colonial period.
Thus Cho suggests that the character of multiculturalism is not always benevolent, but instead due to the political complexity of the modern world sometimes renders itself in the painful reminders of the brutal hierarchies with which certain countries have dominated others. It achieves this through the medium of architecture, in equal measures leveraging the existing structure and estranging our perception of it by the slicing, obfuscating and reframing of our viewpoint. A particular eloquence of the project lies in its capacity to explicate these means through architectural material, endowing otherwise abstract materials with cultural or perceptual significance. The stone foundation of the Government Building is solid by structural necessity yet recast in the proposal as if it were geological bedrock, literalized in its embeddedness in the ground of the city itself. The cool, glassy surface that covers the substructure at once conceals and exposes its artifact like an uncovered ruin suspended in a condition of continuous, anonymous exposition. Cho’s glass canvas is clever in its abstraction, because though it references the surreal, endless surfaces of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument and invokes a certain ideal of tabula rasa innate to much of architectural modernity, its intense compression between the space of the palace’s existing courtyard and the foundations of the imperial building which once so immensely interrupted its forecourt magnifies the intensity of colonial occupation within the calamity of Korea’s postwar history and culture. It suggests that the foundations of imperialism are inescapable and ultimately discomfortingly quintessential to contemporary experience.
In so far as Cho’s proposal for the Gyeongbokgung Palace and the Japanese General Government Building evades a catharsis from Korea’s colonial legacy by electing to retain some amount of the latter building on site, it suggests that much of contemporary life must be understood as necessarily multicultural in an age of globalism regardless of the circumstances surrounding such entanglement. Where works of architectural modernism abroad and in Korea alike speculated about cosmopolitan life in the age of industrialization, Cho’s project postulates a mode of existence for how we inhabit the aftermath of economic and cultural cross-pollination across the Global North during the twentieth century. It inhabits a reality reticent to obscure the scars of collective pasts, recognizing instead the futility of erasing the representational significance of a building such as that erected by the occupational Japanese government in front of the Gyeongbokgung Palace. Against the will to escape one’s past, the project engages cultural memory as a medium itself, rendered delicately through architecture. Its intentionally partial demolition of the Government Building proposes a non-cathartic reconciliation with Korea’s unsettling modern history contrary to the forces that ultimately achieved their ambition to remove the structure from the palace’s forecourt. It offers no simple answer for how the people of Seoul, or more broadly Korea, should negotiate the difficulties their history, but instead leaves open the question of what it means to inhabit a post-colonial world. Cho creates, through architecture, a series of spaces in which to undertake this process of reconciliation, but purposefully avoids presupposing how one should encounter, interpret or come to terms with any perplexing past.
Because it remains purely speculatory, Cho’s repurposing of the Government Building at Gyeongbokung Palace is uninflected by the prevalent politics, economies and program that shape most projects. Though it remains theoretical, various qualities of the project can be tracked through Cho’s later projects through their constituent parts: a concern with history and site, or an attentive focus on ambiguous yet meaningful material juxtaposition. The disciplinary premises underpinning the project conceptually become particularly clear in BCHO’s renovation of a factory building at a manufacturing complex in Busan, marketed under the moniker F1963. Though the project begins less contentiously than the proposal for Gyeongbokgung Palace, it seeks in no less a way than its antecedent to examine, uncover and question the historical context around which it is realized. Initially conceived to provide the city with a cultural exhibition space as an extension of the nearby Kiswire Complex, also designed by BCHO, the project consummates a real-world execution of several elements from the Gyeongbokgung project. As is such, the transcription of these earlier ideas into built architectural form can be read in reverse, from building back to theory, in the process unfurling the methods by which Cho’s work articulates cultural influences, site considerations and material qualities through architectural form.
The adjacency of F1963 to another two BCHO projects realized before the factory’s remodeling, the Kiswire Offices and Kiswire Museum and Training Center, provides two benchmarks of comparison in the timeline of Cho’s career. Each offers a waypoint by which to calibrate the development of the office’s prerogatives across various projects. While the Kiswire buildings are entirely new construction and therefore somewhat unlike F1963, they demonstrate an interest in abstract, pure forms materialized in monolithic concrete volumes that track across other works from the office’s early catalogue. When considered alongside Cho’s academic projects that immediately proceeded his practice’s establishment, these buildings constitute a period of work in which the architect’s relationship with form and abstraction had not yet taken up issues of site history, formal reference and subtle materiality so boldly. Such projects from Cho’s early career speak to a narrower set of disciplinary aspirations, and their general reluctance to address contextual histories shows a point at which Cho had not clearly fused his interest in cultural memory – as in earlier theoretical projects such as the proposal for the Government Building or ultimately at F1963 itself – into the built work itself. Where a sensibility intimate with the Scandinavian design ethos of Lewerentz or Aalto permeates the interplay between concrete, steel and wood in some of Cho’s later projects, these two buildings remain largely concrete, interested in a clearer presentation of a Corbusian ambition for the material.
Rendered in stark concrete volumes materialized in uniform, didactic applications of concrete or steel, these projects represent a material understanding conceptually more in accordance with earlier practitioners of Modernism in Korea, such as Kim Jongeob and Kim Swooguen, both of whom crafted their lineage more distinctly within the paradigm of Modernist architecture delineated by Le Corbusier (Pai). By comparison, Cho’s later work on F1963 illustrates several key rearrangements in the architect’s thinking which intertwine architectural motifs sourced from both local conditions and international references. An initial encounter with this recalibrated concept of space occurs at the facility’s entrance, where Cho extrudes the volume of the existing warehouses forward towards a pedestrian path bisecting the site. This extension physicalizes a space between history and the present, crafting an ambiguous space of deep architectural poché . The ontological ambiguity of this operation is extrapolated not only in the interstitial form of the entrance portico it creates but extends thematically to its materiality, encasing the space in a light scrim of expanded metal. Through its diaphanous quality, the metal unifies the various disparate factory buildings along a single, clear circulatory pathway. It gives form to a complex of cultural spaces that is simultaneously diverse yet unified. Seemingly less concerned with the sureness of absolute, concrete forms than at his previous work for Kiswire, the porosity of this sheathing around the structures at F1963’s campus insinuates a material understanding that is decidedly more interested in the character of spatial uncertainty. Innate divisions between an interior or exterior, the historic or the contemporary, are thereby subverted as binaries incapable of capturing the phenomenological spirit of a culturally multidimensional world. In contrast to the finite nature of opaqueness and translucency respective to concrete and glass, the perforated metal employed in the design is of a noticeably in-between quality. It is neither solid nor transparent, but rather defined by its paradoxical metallic porosity and the unexpected view it provides from one side each metal panel to the other.
Across its interior of its various warehouses, the renovation leaves the extant wooden structure exposed. Because the compound is comprised of a haphazard of warehouses constructed as needed throughout the history of the site, this design choice provides a backdrop across the interior experience that is at once intricate in its geometry, as each space presents a different structural arrangements of columns and beams, yet united in its wooden character. Cho asserts that this material decision emerged from a contextual consideration . Though the factory buildings initially gave an impression of characterlessness, their sequential construction over a 60-year period and mundane materiality spoke to a rapidly disappearing moment in Busan’s industrial history. The design therefore retains its threadbare wooden skeleton in an act of material remembrance as if to recall the engrained plurality of cultures which permeate just a single city or even neighborhood. In preserving the original qualities of the factory complex, Cho asks us to inhabit a moment of Busan’s history before precipitous development, a period of the city’s history soon forgotten beneath a wave of gentrification.
This conversation between temporal states of a site’s culture creates an indexical relationship across the architecture between the site’s extant conditions and Cho’s meticulous interventions. For example, newly constructed elements differentiated in a sheathing of metal finishes, ranging in treatment from wan, pearlescent white paint to polish. The contrast between clean, painted metal and the exposed wooden structure of the warehouses is poignantly dynamic in its materiality and demonstrates a breadth of material qualities more extensive than employed on the two previous projects at the site. While the use of metal in spaces such as the library elicits a sensory ambition akin to Alvar Aalto’s Vyborg Library (1927-1935), the immediate adjacency between such filigree detailing and the exposed wooden framing of the complex suggests a wider engagement of materiality than purely Modern abstraction. Cho’s varied array of techniques at play across F1963 speaks to his diverse understanding of architectural threads across both broad cultural moments and specific design periods. Where the architecture chooses to reveal a cacophony of wooden structure across the facility, he provides a foil in the cool minimalism of select metallic finishes. The flexibility of this approach relies not only on Cho’s innate aptitude for design but on a vast willingness to simultaneously work with references as varied as the materiality of European Modernism or the history of the site itself. In so far as the project engages the messiness of its extant conditions, it advocates for a rethinking of the often overlooked state of the contemporary city. It supposes a reseeing of what already exists, a careful examination in the very wood, brackets and screws of the factory complex which ask us to consider not only the literal materials we encounter but the conditions of society, economy and history around which they are predicated. This ambition is particularly important when considering the program of the space as a contemporary art venue. Hardly the abstract white box of a gallery, Cho’s revitalization of the warehouse’s empty wooden volumes uses the peculiarities of the context to push back at the art contained inside.
In unpacking the office’s work, it becomes clear that Cho’s prerogatives are reserved for no single building but ebb and flow from one project to another, each a point of inflection at which overarching conceptual principles are negotiated with the specificities of a particular typology, site or material. At another project for a small countryside house for instance, Cho continues to unfold such ongoing experimentations. Perched on a cleared hillside in Yangpyeong, the siting, materiality and highly selective fenestration of the Concrete Box House demonstrate the capacity of the architect’s work to critically utilize historical reference and contemporary circumstance as disciplinarily critical tools. In an area speckled with countryside weekend retreats for middle- to upper-class families from adjacent Seoul, the project eschews the instinctive motivation to embrace cliché understandings of nature and domesticity, instead speculating on forms of recreational inhabitation and nature. The house offers a highly prevocational statement based in an articulate position towards historical form and a wide understanding of material character.
Upon arrival, the project’s stands nestled into the cusp of the hillside atop an embankment, concealing the mass of the house within its natural topography. While the house’s approach could have followed any number of other arrangements which more prominently displayed the residence, Cho’s decision to create such an understated arrival is informed by his careful study of traditional Buddhist temples constructed in Korea during the Joseon period (1392-1897), during which a heavily Confucian state drove Buddhist enclaves into the mountainous countryside (Cho, 2018). In brisk moments during approach up a small, lowland road leading to the site, the form of the house is hinted at but never fully uncovered. The crescendo of this arrival entirely conceals house behind a stone embankment around which steps guide the visitor to its doorway, its pathway reticent to wallow in the typical flash of a weekend residence. Like those temples built by political imperative into the undulations of hillside ravines, the overall position of the house is compressed into its earthen surroundings. Its entrance is unadorned, its presence slowly unfurling in a game of concealment and discovery. Neither the house itself nor its site are rendered indulgently. One’s encounter with the concrete mass is always at an oblique angle, a temperament due in equal parts to its obedience to the curve of the slope as to Cho’s fascination with a with the askew. Thus, the house constantly evades being static or symmetrical, constantly insinuating movement along its peripheries. The use of a simple rectangular massing becomes the symmetrical counterpoint to each of these lateral maneuvers, beginning first from this circuitous approach. The constancy of this movement dislocates us from the expected, unseating the typical behaviors to which we assume a building ought to adhere.
On ascent, the embankment of a small driveway gives way to the house’s looming, concrete form. Its doorway is austere, a singular indication of a domestic interiority inside its mass. What windows do penetrate the building’s enclosure are located along the other three edges of the box, unseen from its entrance. The experience of approaching the Concrete Box House is frank and permeated at first with a stark incongruity between the site’s lush greenery and crisp concrete volume of the residence. Though its form is abstract and Modern in its inornate disposition, its entranced stance into the landscape speaks to an ambition for architecture that is experientially complex. This simplistic binary unravels as upon entry, at which point rather than the immediacy of domestic space a one encounters a small foyer lined with bamboo and moss. This linking space is neither wholly natural nor artificial, its concrete and rocky moss garden somehow held in a tensile equilibrium. It is in the betweenness of this space that the house begins to splinter the false dichotomy between the manmade and the organic. Cho’s insistence on the direct juxtaposition of these seemingly dichotomous materials – concrete and bamboo, stone and grass hints at a delicately calibrated understanding of existence which, like so many of the other aspects of his work, overcomes the binaristic narratives to which we thoughtlessly subject architectural. Concrete and stone exist gently side by side much the same as overall sharpness of the house’s exterior arbitrates its dissimilarity with the organic shape of the site’s hillside by nestling into natural curve of the clearing. Though frugal in his use of material and form, Cho arranges the house and its spaces to present a multiplicity of perspectives about inhabitation.
The enclosed space that succeeds the small garden-like foyer continues to complicate the project’s understanding. At entry, the various domestic spaces of the building pinwheel out around this large central void. Here, Cho is explicit about the project’s us of the traditional Korean madang, or courtyard typology. The emptiness of this space implores us to peer inwards onto a pod that fills the house’s geometric center, reinforced experientially by an exceedingly sparse use of fenestration. Whereas a site with panoramic vistas as enticing as those of the Concrete Box House would suggest maximum visibility outwards, Cho’s articulation of the madang inspires an urge to look in more evocative than any instinctive will to look out. Besides its two entrances and a small, knee-height slot along its southwestern edge, the majority of moments where the concrete enclosure of the house acquiesces to its surroundings come in the form of skylights. What surrounding nature we do bear witness to in this space is administered in vignettes – a tree branch drifting into view of the courtyard amid a passing gust of wind or the auditory deluge rustling leaves dancing outside during autumn. Cho constricts our senses in the house’s interior so that each fleeting moment of encounter with the outside world becomes lavishly significant.
Whether through obstruction or display, Cho’s interrogation of architecture’s phenomenological capacity to reposition our perception of the world around us highlights the social and cultural dimensions that predicate our experience of life. His design affronts the tendency to privilege assumed hierarchies of experience, such as the primacy of unobstructed views over introspective architectural space. Cho fortifies the architecture itself, blocking out all but the most critical vantages. Delicate incisions into house’s concrete envelope demonstrate both a comprehension of and an affinity towards innovating on other architects’ work. Chief among these are the clear allusions the project makes to Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz, whose detailing of the apertures at the Church of Saint Peter (Klippan, 1963-1966) Cho decidedly references in his thin slot windows dotting the perimeter of the Concrete Box House.
Such diligent management of the project’s interior relationship to its surrounding landscape intensifies the experience of its central courtyard, around which splay out the building’s loosely defined rooms. These outlying spaces are interspersed with large, wooden columns to support the uninterrupted spans of concrete roof above. Because Cho scatters these vertical interruptions seemingly at random, the space of the house is intentionally absent of the hierarchies typical in domestic settings. Inhabited spaces are delineated more by suggestion than purposeful division, the only explicit function provided for being a kitchen. The structural elements are themselves several-centuries-year-old wooden posts repurposed from a temple in Korea, their placement populating the otherwise empty expanse of the interstitial space between the project’s hollow center and its impenetrable concrete shell. The overall experience of inhabitation in the space thus becomes an one of suspension. Its character is chiefly a feeling vertigo amid the field of wooden columns punctuated by the drama of an immense, subtractive center. The significance of these maneuvers exists in a cultural understanding project’s relationship to the site itself, though both its allusion to traditional methods of Korean landscape treatment as well as its refutation of the picturesque landscape surrounding the property. Like other projects, these interests track precisely Cho’s willingness to incorporate a broad range of architectural trajectories in his work, both ancient and contemporary.
Cho employs a multicultural understanding of the broad lineages innate within various forms of contemporary architecture to create something that responds to local conditions, even those far removed from such source material. The project thus functions as a paradigmatic example of negotiating highly localized cultural conventions, here the madang as a spatial typology of traditional Korean architecture, with broader historical trajectories, such as Modernism. The use of these techniques serves the project in so far as it buttresses a critical thesis about domesticity in South Korea. The interplay of these references offers a critical reading of contemporary Korean identity through an architecture deeply critical of both trite design choices in inhabitation and the socioeconomic conditions predicating such investment by the upper classes of Seoul in rural weekend property in Yangpyeong. Were Cho unwilling to employ a broad, decidedly international set of disciplinary references in his work, it is dubious if such a poignant argument would be capable of taking form in the otherwise understated temperament of the house’s architecture. Nothing about the house is pedantically direct, and it presents no answers to the provocations it posits. It achieves its aims to deliver an experience of inhabitation that is uniquely meaningful while nevertheless articulating a strong curiosity about what it might mean for a country or class of citizens to inhabit such a space.
Because it presents spaces in which architectural references from various heritages, cultures and disciplinary approaches are enmeshed simultaneously, Cho’s work theorizes an alternative methodology of multiculturalism, beyond collage or paltry reference, more adequately positioned to encompass the ambiguity of identity in the twenty-first century. These principles of design invoke the context of a building – be that context its literal siting or more abstract considerations of place and history – not for its superficial aesthetic but for its possibility to enfranchise the vast number of constituencies populating contemporary life. While the Concrete Box House, for instance, serves an exceptionally specific group of inhabitants (Cho and his immediate family), its architecture is nevertheless converses with various levels of cultural references. Cho’s routine incorporation of a material palette borrowed from late European Modernism with traditional Korean ideas about siting and spatial procession demonstrate his aptitude for this intricate act of architectural orchestration. The work is thus most eloquent when engaging a number of references as extensive as possible without reverting to mere citation. Cho is fastidious about his references, considering each for its effectiveness in a particular site or cultural context. Where the office’s buildings do reference recognized architectural forms or material implementations, they do so to a degree that evades simple replication. This condition of hyper-multiplicity in their projects’ source material testifies to a disciplinary dialogue that privileges an intriguing synthesis between various standpoints over a mishmash of individual cultures. Cho’s approach is therefore refreshingly adept at speculating on the increasingly ambiguous condition of cultural lineage, exceptionally relevant for a world whose cultural exchange is mediated primarily through the borderless medium of the internet. In probing the spatial implications of this globalized culture, the work is uniquely prescient in its capacitive rendering of these otherwise abstract forces of intersectionality, heritage and cultural identity. The result is an architecture both present in its immediate context and broad in its disciplinary ambitions in the sense that it engages architectural concerns far greater than its immediate situation.
Cho’s buildings suggest something more meaningful than their mere materials or form, evoking a transcontinental understanding of space, lineage and culture. Citing a broad range of spatial understandings from architectural history, they at once reach out and draw us in. The intellectual skillfulness of incorporating in such close proximity this astonishingly broad repertoire of references lies in its efficacy at conceiving a quality of space entirely belonging to a twenty-first century, multicultural identity without acquiescing to outmoded ideas of disorderly collage or aesthetic stereotype. The buildings have a resounding capacity to be entirely of the current zeitgeist while effortlessly remaining timeless, engendering in equal parts their past, present and anticipated future. In their abundance of conceptual methodologies, they advocate an understanding of space and inhabitation that is refreshingly decentralized and remarkably cognizant of the diverse constituencies populating contemporary existence. Cho’s buildings represent essential waypoints for an emerging architectural dialogue around multiculturalism which is enmeshed in the complex cultural interface of the twenty-first century. Sublimely attune to the ambiguity of contemporary identity in our continually more interwoven world, they constitute architectural speculations worthy of canonical recognition in South Korea and beyond.
Cho, Byoungsoo, “Mak and bium: imperfection and emptiness in Korean aesthetics”, Architectural Review, 26 January 2018
Lukasiewicz, Martin (Photographer) (18 September 2012). Window [digital image]. https://flic.kr/p/dUMo7s
Pai, Hyungmin, “Architecture as perpetual crisis: the constantly evolving architecture of South Korea”, The Architectural Review, 19 January 2018
Unnamed Photographer (Flickr User brandsvig). (30 April 2010). S:t Petri Window [digital image]. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brandsvig/4580736153/