Architectural Design Portfolio
2018 Winter
International Competition
Keywords
Sustainable Urbanism, Social Sustainability,
Urban Regeneration and Renewal
Location
Oriental Bay Pavilion , Wellington, New Zealand
Program
Observatory, Gallery, Cafe
Assignment
Space is void rather than volume, image is interior and material shares a novel and integral role with context. So what happens to the object, the icon, when it has no exterior?
Arch out loud challenged designers to develop proposals for an underground bathhouse in the Kroean Demilitarized Zone. The bathhouse maintains an historeical identity as a place for social interaction. From the Roman bath to the Finnish sauna, every culture has its own unique rituals and architecture for bathing. The competition produced a varied collection of architectural proposals which reimagine and indulgence. The collection of work is intercultural, tapping into local and global traditions of bathing as social custom, while redressing the concept of a border as an interface of cultures rather than the division thereof.
Throughout history, the definition of territory has remained a fundamental determinant of power. Borders carry immense historical, political, and cultural implications, and their delineation is often at the center of conflict. Borders are representations in plan, lines on a map, which vary in their association to land form and natural obstacle. At most, lines materialize in the common form of walls, seldom tracing the entire length of the borders they articulate. One notable exception is the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
If the traditional border is a line, then the Korean DMZ is a surface. At 4 kilometers wide, it is a border territory : a border with its own border; a boundary space; a materializsed, geopolitical area seperating North and South. It is one of the most heavily militarized and fortified borders in the world, and is representative of one of the most high-tensioned ongoing conflicits in recent history.
Contemporary geopolitics and global conflicts demand that nations grapple with border security. So what can one of the longest-running border conflicts reveal about the nature and potential of borders in general? Architecture contributes, agrees, conforms, reacts, reponds, contrasts, conflicts, and even opposes context. But what does architecture do with context when it goes underground? The meaning of boundary lines and the territories they define quickly deflate in section-the drawing most privileged in describing subsuperfical conditions.
Subterranean architecture imposes the position of an anti-object on design. With little to no visible exterior, archtiecture loses an assumed relationship with its immediate context.
The DMZ is a demilitarized zone located in the military demarcation line between South Korea and North Korea. South and North Korea are currently in a state of ceasefire, but tensions of war still persist between them. The theme of the competition was to create a public bathhouse in DMZ that both South and North Korea could use. There should be no meaning of war here, and we would like to propose a space where South and North Korea can be united and harmonized.