Tectonics of Today: The Semi-Transparency of the Decorated Structure
Choi Wonjoon, professor at Soongsil University, studied and earned his Ph.D. in architectural theory and history at Seoul National University. He worked at Iroje Architects & Planners before pursuing his post-doctoral studies at Columbia University. He recently co-authored the oral histories of Kimm Jongsoung (2018) and Yoo Kerl (2020) and The Future We Have Drawn: 100 Years of Korean Contemporary Architecture (2022), co-curated the exhibitions ‘Sections of Autonomy: Six Korean Architects’ (2017) and ‘Cosmopolitan Look: Contemporary Korean Architecture 1989-2019’ (2019), and is currently a steering committee member of Mokchon Architecture Archive.
Architect Min Wusik, who has long ‘focused on small architecture’ and building types of houses and cafés, values a pure phenomenal experience of architecture that does not depend on external discourse. The atmosphere evoked by an encounter between a white form and exquisite quality of light has something in common with the works of early Le Corbusier and Alvaro Siza, but a distinctive character can be found in an enriched expression obtained by slight alteration to the overall order. He uses a single diagonal or curved line that runs counter to a perpendicular system, and even in the latter case, he chooses over arbitrary shapes a circular cylinder (Concave Lens, 2015), a vault that defies gravity (Vault House, 2017), or a parabola that conforms to it (Café TONN, 2019). Diagonal House is therefore an example of the extremity of such an economically controlled expressivity. The interior space, which is a three-dimensional creation of an encounter between the sole diagonal line
