Peter Pan: Mixed Feelings
I cannot make sense of the architect Park Changhyun. The more I know, the more I feel puzzled. I have tried to grasp his meaning, but I have often found it too difficult to discern any clear answers. Even though I have a longstanding familiarity with him and his work, Park Changhyun is still an obscure figure to me. He is as blurry as the profile picture used on his social networking sites. Perhaps it was in the winter of 2013 that we first met, in a fairly large exhibition hall in downtown Seoul in which the Swiss Architecture Exhibition was on show. He gave a lecture on Peter Zumthor as a part of the exhibition. Less publicly prominent at this time, Park Changhyun nevertheless played a leading role in translating and publishing Peter Zumthor’s and – which Korean architects came to regard as the Bible – and supervised its eventual publication. I wondered how one could lead such lectures and publications without a direct connection to the architect, regardless of how much one may admire their subject. On the other hand, it was a courageous and impressive project. Until that point his work had been devoted to the haptic and sensuous, expressed through architectural elements such as materials, properties, detailing, ornamentation, light, and
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