Category: Writing

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Bulguksa

The heritage is fragile. War, fire and natural disasters are commonly known enemies. During the Japanese occupation period, the historic property of Korea has suffered for avowed robbery and poor maintenance. Countless precious assets have disappeared over the East Sea; even a whole building of the royal palace was just torn off and moved away. Bulguksa, the most historic and symbolic Buddhist temple of Korea, couldn’t be an exception.

©J-W.HWANG

Then, over 70 years passed; today, is this temple correctly restored? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Era-mixed shapes of the roofs and pillars, unmatched motifs and colors of the paintwork, tourist-friendly landscaping, everything is imagined and flavored to proceed the delicate restoration as quickly as possible, without time-consuming further historical research, and to use as a propaganda of the immature politics.

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Symmetry 2

Symmetry is harmonious compliance among the members of the work itself and correlation between the parts and the whole general figure based on a selected piece as standard. In the human body, there is a balanced symmetrical property from the forearm, foot, palm, finger, and other small elements; so it is with the buildings. For example, in the sacred edifices, symmetry is designed from the thickness of a column or from the module of triglyphs, as in a ballista from the hole what Greeks call the περίτρητος, as in a ship from the space in between each thole pin (διάπηγμα); in every other work, there is a system of symmetry calculated from a component.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio – De Architectura (translation in English ©J-W.HWANG)

Place de Thessalie, Montpellier, France (©J-W.HWANG)
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Symmetry

… As far as the eyes could reach, no one has perceived more than the slaughter houses, the enclosing walls and a few rare facades of the factories alongside the barracks and the monasteries; wherever stood the hovels and the rubbish of old walls blackened as cerecloth, of latest walls whitened as winding sheets; everywhere erected the parallel rows of trees, the aligned buildings and the flat constructions of the bleak long line and of the gloomy sadness of right angles. No heterogeneity on the tissue, no caprice of architecture, no crease. It was glacial, regular and hideous landscape. Nothing represses the heart like symmetry. Symmetry is ennui; ennui founds anguish. Despair bores. Imagine something more terrible than hell in which everyone suffers; it’s in that hell where one would be tedious. If such hell existed, a bit of the Boulevard de l’Hopital might have been its avenue.

Victor Hugo – Les Misérables (translation in English ©J-W.HWANG)

Château de Chambord (©J-W.HWANG)
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Prada Marfa

Five buildings and Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” (6, revised)

Prada Marfa, Valentine, Texas, United States

The Prada boutique of Marfa shows seriously concerned details for its small size; it was the owner of the brand in person who selected the articles to display. Due to its location, just off the borderless highway, it has suffered for vandalism and robbery; every time that happened, the Ballroom Marfa, a local nonprofit organization paid for repairs.

Prada Marfa (source: ballroommarfa.org)

In brief, this is not a building. It’s an installation art to show how it wears off gradually in rain and in wind of Texas over time, designed by two creators supported by this organization. The appearance is almost same as the real, but it’s never opened for business. Functionally useless, however, one might recall the absurdity of consumption or meaninglessness of existence through this mimic on the wasteland.

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Anexo del Ayuntamiento de Murcia

Five buildings and Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” (5, revised)

Diversity: Anexo del Ayuntamiento de Murcia, Murcia, Spain

Buildings are drawn, constructed and used with predetermined purposes. Houses are created to inhabit, and factories are made to produce. Sometimes a power plant or a railway station is redesigned for another program such as the Tate Modern or the Musée d’Orsay, but those cases are quite exceptional. The encyclopedia tries to include all knowledge of the world; the literary work aspires to reach the truth of the universe. The building always possesses a distinct and practical reason; at the very beginning, it was merely a static tool as a shelter to protect a “fragile” human being from unknown external risks.

Tate Modern in 2009 (©J-W.HWANG)

However, putting the buildings together one by one on an identical plane, another point of view arises, since they create relationship including equipoise, hierarchy, territory, boundary, homogeneity, heterogeneity, conformity, multiplicity, and so on. This contextual entanglement, called a city, offers a field to observe the meaning of a building, focusing on why people conceive and accept it on that specific location. In other words, the city is a pending outcome of the society, as an enormous architecture that never ends.

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