January 1997

Late afternoon on a clear January day, I visited Hailim Suh’s "House for four Views", a newly completed residential project in Seoul. It is through this house that I hope to learn something about the condition of present day Korean architecture and its future.

As a byproduct of the Korean economic expansion of the last thirty years , the city of Seoul has become a modern metropolis. Along with modernization, Seoul is experiencing the birth pains of a city under very, very, fast growth. For architecture and urbanism this vibrant cultural and economic reality creates conditions and great possibilities for experimentation and questioning. I found that Korea is in the middle of a great hungry search for a new cultural and artistic expression. This craving for a new identity is commonly found in nations undergoing rapid change and is sometimes associated with a wide-spread desire for introversion, self-containment and over-delineation of boundary conditions. We might call this a search for a new grand narrative both at individual and group level.

It is in the light of these observations that I relate Ms. Suh’s statement that "each house in Korea is self-contained within high walls and oblivious in relation to its neighbors. Most houses in Seoul are turned inwards." Thus her main goal became the task of reconnecting the house to the outside both spatially and metaphorically.

As we climbed the exterior stairs wrapping around the house, Ms. Suh spoke of her space ordering strategies: "As an urban house, I wanted to make connections at ‘various scales’, expanding the house from a scale of an individual to the city, to the earth and to the universe." The house, she continued, was conceived as a series of thresholds ,where approaching from the street one encounters ‘ground line’ as the first bodily system of reference. The journey up the hill through the house is a narrative of an expanding awareness of distance. This expansion of a bounded intimate space and the desire to give the house more space than it has objectively, was at the center of a modernist desire to break the inert classical box. In this dynamic tension between house and universe, Ms Suh’s narrative intentions remind me of Gaston Bachelard’s discourse on house and universe in the Poetics of Space:

For Ms Suh, like for Bachelard, "the house, then, really is an instrument of topo-analysis" both spatial and cultural. The architecture of the site is larger than the plot of land. She achieves this by provoking in the viewer a bodily awareness of his/her relationship to the immediate ground, the Han River, the mountain, the city and the horizon. "The house conquers its share of the sky. It has the entire sky for its terrace."

Someone once described architecture as a concrete abstraction - or in other words, a sensorial experience to which human beings attribute meaning. In the case of architecture the concrete phenomena is spatial and tactile. Architecture is also a mnemonic device used to aid human beings in the task of individual and group memory. In order to grasp, classify and remember an object there are two strategies available to us according to Husserl’s phenomenological method. The first is to imbed the object into a story; the second is to focus on the subject, the inhabitant’s experience. The bodily perception of the object is strategically made thematic. That is where the poetic power of architecture resides.

Ms. Suh’s design makes good use of both strategies. Like the transformer toys children play with, the house provokes a series of metamorphoses of its identity. But instead of an animal transforming into a machine, the house exists as both cell and world simultaneously. This is done through a quick set of rotations , shifts in spatial references and views. Starting from the given ground datum, the initial reference baseline for body in space, one climbs into the next realm , where the house becomes a place in the city, a roof line in relation to the horizon and finally, where the ceiling opens up to the sky , a universe. In the end, in its final transformation, the house returns to its primary role, as home. Deep in its volume, the bedrooms rest undisturbed. The public journey, on the other hand, through all the other realms and spatial configurations give it a rich existence born out of the simultaneity of being in more than one place at the time.

In a longer article one might give a more precise description of the house in architectural terms, showing how the ambiguity of inside and outside is articulated through the use of materials, the sequence of points, lines, planes and volumes used as thresholds and/or boundaries marking inside/outside, solid/void, heavy/light, up/down , far/close. This multiplicity of points of view, systems of references, and of material expressions give the house that Ms. Suh built a lightness, quickness and visibility, of itself and the world, while remaining consistent to its own particular condition in time and space. These are the very qualities that have been suggested for the next millennium.

As the name suggests, The House for Four Views by Hailim Suh contains a message of inclusion and multiplicity, a reminder that a new artistic expression, for an individual or a country, emerges not only by searching for an interior ‘essence’, but also through a constructive and critical engagement with the outside world.

Dan Bucsescu

Associate Professor of Architecture, Pratt Institute, New York