Minsuk Cho visits James Turrell's Twilight Epiphany on the Rice University campus. Photo: Mary Beth Woiccak.
The Spring 2014 Rice Design Alliance/Rice School of Architecture Lecture Series is shaping up. Here, Alfonso E. Hernandez of Kirksey Architecture reflects on a lecture from the Fall 2013 series, Re:Architecture [NSFW], by Minsuk Cho of Korean firm Mass Studies.
A limping Minsuk Cho --- his leg had a cast and brace --- made an appearance on October 2 at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to present his work and talk about his design process. Head of the firm Mass Studies in Seoul, Cho emphasized the idea of working from seemingly binary oppositions that do not always seem binary --- old vs. ephemeral, simple vs. complex, etc. These dichotomies show how Mass Studies goes about the design process: diagrammatic creativity is always a positive feeding force, while rigor and self-editing act as negative feedback, closing the loop.
2012 Songwon Art Center. Photo: Kyungsub Shin.
2011 Daum Space.1. Photo: Kyungsub Shin.
Korea Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010. Photo: Yong-Kwan Kim.
Formed in 2003 upon Cho’s return to Korea, Mass Studies is a young studio, yet it has an impressive body of work. For many of us architects and designers who have been trained in or have worked in Houston --- a city where urban fabric-based design seems as unattainable and incomprehensible as derivatives and credit default swaps --- seeing pictures of Cho’s buildings pop up in Seoul seemed striking and foreign: He jokingly made the observation that Seoul was something like 13 times denser than Houston.
One striking overarching feature in Cho's work is something Rice School of Architecture professor Ron Witte has called the “exuberance in the local:” that characteristic that makes Korean public space have a certain domesticity --- or, as Cho calls it, "collective intimacy" --- which makes it very habitable and immediately familiar. Mass Studies takes great advantage of this. And it makes you wonder why people are out on the streets in Seoul and not in Houston: Is it the climate? The sense of scale? Or an element of ethnic and cultural cohesiveness in a country with less than 1 percent immigration rate, where the stranger is as familiar as a member of your own family? Or is it all the above?
Ephemerality is a pervasive concept in Asian architecture. Seoul is 620 years old, yet it is an ephemeral town, much in the same fashion as Houston has been dubbed in the past due in large part to the blandness of its construction. One wonders whether, in these days of "starchitecture" and its cult followers, this sense of ephemerality is as serious and well-intended as it had been in the past. I heard Toyo Ito in 2009 claim that he didn't want his buildings to be in place for more than 40 years. And then what? Demolition? Displacement? Adaptive reuse? Holograms? Arson? Or a highly expensive revamp?
Are we (and they) being serious or just being politely facetious?
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Read Alfonso E. Hernandez on the 2011 Alfredo Brillembourg RDA/RSA lecture.
