AS IF YOU KNOW IT ALL: THE RESIDENCE OF MR. SONG BY CHO SUNG-LYUL

Suh Jaewon graduated from Dankook University and Gyeonggi University Graduate School of Architecture, and is currently the principal of aoa architects. He observes the multifaceted nature of our contemporary society with an ambivalent view, adopting the perspective of ‘critical acceptance’ and aiming to embody the ‘contemporary characteristics’ of Korean society through binary oppositions such as incongruity and harmony, rationality and irrationality, satire and jokes. In 2017, he won the Korean Young Architect Award and was selected as the Noteworthy Architect of the Year. He is currently working as an adjunct professor at Hanyang University and as a Seoul Public Architect.

One particular house caught my eye when scanning a large sample of 1960 ‒ 1970s houses, and made me laugh a little, emphasising a time in which all sorts of baseless abstract forms seemed to have been let loose. This is a design phenomenon which persists to this day. The house, labelled Residence of Mr. Song at Hannam-dong, first captures the imagination as a result of its form. The house could easily be read as a cartoonish form with an animal leaping out of it in the forest, owing to windows that suddenly protrude over the roof like pop-up headlamps on a sportscar, or even frog’s eyes, and a gabled roof which overwhelms the entire house. With the rooftop continuing down to the floor, theNo.79 (Oct. 1973) in which the house was introduced, reinforces the hypothesis that only elevation sketches can be featured with an absence of cross-sections, the so-called crowning glory of blueprints, and this is further reflected by the fact that scarcely any of the portfolios left by the architect thereafter feature cross-sections. The Residence of Mr. Song at Hannam-dong features two similar large and small right-angled triangles joined together, facing downwards in a convivial manner and featuring a play of fractal geometry when observed alongside windows of various sizes which suddenly protrude perpendicularly from the roof. What augments this visual effect is the 45 degree angle of the roof, which can be seen as extremely unprecedented in a structure of this nature. While a gabled roof itself was a common form at the time, as they were mostly built with wood except for in particular circumstances, the slope would not exceed three tenths on average due to material and financial constraints, as well as the governing climate and cultural sentiments in Korea. However, the angle of the roof, put in place with a certain tenacity in the Residence of Mr. Song at Hannam-dong, derides all of the epochal compositional and cultural norms and can be seen to abide by distinct principles of its own, when considering the intense efforts put into the geometrical image—going so far as to create a 45 degree sloping slabbed roof. As a result, the house succeeds in appearing like a hut, of basic shapes and simple form, as the architect intended, expressing a mysterious tension between the figurative and the abstract. The house is intends to appear as such to all entering the site. In cases where design conduct is determined by strict formal principles, the issue becomes one of resolving the function of the project, while the spatial composition featured in the plan provides an extremely interesting spatial experience as well as an overt function. Of course, the pre-existing difference in levels throughout the site plays a determining role, and yet the discerning eye of the architect, who has resolved these challenging conditions with vibrancy is something of note. The internal spaces are composed in a clear way, including the lower level thought to be to the south, the common areas like the living room which connect to the garden, and the higher level with service spaces such as the corridor, kitchen, and room for the guardian. The children’s rooms are gathered together on the second floor above the living room, completing the mass of the larger triangle when seen from the outside, while the kitchen quarters are single level which form a smaller triangle, with zoning and form naturally creating a sense of unity. Above all, attention must be paid to the stairs placed at the centre of the two spaces; while they seem to be nothing out of the ordinary, appearing like typical spiraling staircases, the spatial experience they provide is not so simple. With landings, the stairs are connected to diverse spaces, appearing to be a continuation of the corridor. Continuing on from the dining area, where a L-form wall which splits the middle, the skipped floor spaces connect to each other yet remain visually shut, resulting in a long perpendicular corridor within the house. This raises a sense of emotional tension by making it difficult for the residents to read the structure of the space at a single glance. Also, the protruding stairs on one side of the living room is more ornamental than functional, loosely deconstructing the functionality of the spiral stairs. This creates an image that one is observing part of a residential project by Adolf Loos, which in turn makes it regrettable that the two firmly blocked spaces (due to the wall placed on the lower level) are located at the same level. While it may not seem out of the ordinary, what was of undeniable fascination to the author was the floor just in front of the staircase which divides the living room and the corridor. This door cleanly dissects ‒ perpendicularly as well as horizontally ‒ the house, and it comes across as unfamiliar due to the location of the door. In most cases, an inner gate is placed in front of the entry to divide the entry and the living room areas, whereas, in this house, the inner gate is placed in the square middle of the house. Despite the fact that this ‘inner gate’ could have easily been drawn back towards the entrance, creating an open relationship between the dining area and stairs, a more conservative composition reveals that the interests of the architect were not solely focused on formal play. This simple gesture heightens the contrast between the mazelike internal spaces, disrupting a one to one relationship between form and space. Upon entering the living room, one passes through a quite low and dark corridor, opening the door facing one at the end, to be presented with a low set living room, and this would have been sufficiently attractive to the residents. Descending a couple of stairs down to the living room to sit on the sofa, then mounting up a little higher towards the dining area would also have given the sensation of a pleasant unfamiliarity. When observing the overall relationship between form and plan, the Residence of Mr. Song at Hannam-dong is composed of a form in which spaces are divided up according to the form, rather than composing the form through the addition of spaces, and this can be seen as a quite different approach to the quite sentimental process of architects at the time. It is closer to the Villa Stein, proposed in the second architecture of the four compositions suggested by Le Corbusier in 1927, which Le Corbusier describes as the most difficult yet intellectually satisfying method. One might say it’s a type of game. The Residence of Mr. Song at Hannam-dong even adds a little wit, where the rectangular volume of the second principle has been changed to a triangle. As such, the house can be seen as a masterpiece which provides not only intellectual satisfaction, but also a sense of pleasure, a sense of completion of form, mathematical discipline, coordination of space, as well as kitsch attractiveness to the observer. The project is completely atypical, stemming from a different trajectory of thought, the (un)-ethical approach, which was more familiar when creating work directed by aesthetic scale by slightly altering a form which would have been discovered with dedication from space and function. Then, who precisely was the owner of this house? The fashion designer Troa Cho (original name Cho Youngja), a major figure in the South Korea fashion scene in the 1960s, commissioned her brother, the architect Cho Sung-Lyul, for a residential home. Cho Sung-Lyul recounts this in his portfolio which was published in 1992. architectural design must begin with a human understanding between the architect and the client. The architect can design better houses through an understanding and affection () for the person who is to live there. When the person to live in the house is someone close or familiar, one develops a sense of play () from the onset of the discussion of building the house, which allows one to work with excitement () to build a house of one’s dreams, a house which is good to live in.