At the Boundary Between Architecture and City

JJJ: In-between Space as Cladding

Hyunjoon Yoo is an influential architect and writer already familiar to us for his insightful interpretations of cities and architecture in his books What Cities Live By (2015) and Where Do You Want To Live (2018). He analyses architecture and cities from a keen and creative perspective, connecting this analysis to wider social problems and presenting architectural and urban solutions to these problems. Of the many propositions raised in his books, his most well-known is the critical statement that ‘school is a prison’. In the architectural space, he searches for the reasons behind standardised thinking, difference, and unaccommodating social atmospheres. In his recent book Space Created by Space (2020), he analyses architecture using a cultural anthropological approach. This is very similar to the methods of Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), who tries to explain the branches of human civilisation using evolutionary theory, approaching human civilisation in its entirety from an environmental dimension, rather than approaching it through a more political historical lens.

In his books on architecture and city, he stresses the importance of relationships and communication. Some of the urban solutions he has suggested for societies that have become more standardised, in which communication between age groups and generations gradually disappears, are as follows: the importance of small parks within the city, the density of events that stimulate changes in the city, and the communication and the interaction between various social stratum that take place on benches. His recent architectural works demonstrate his consideration of communication between people, the relationship between buildings