Architecture Entering the Body

Architecture arrives at the body before it reaches the eyes. The foot knows first when crossing a threshold. The shoulders respond before the mind when a corridor's ceiling lowers. The knees remember height when climbing stairs, and the lungs open first upon entering a wide hall. We are already inside a space before we begin to interpret it.

This film documents those moments of entry within the architecture of Kim Seokyun. Through everyday acts—climbing a step, passing through a corridor, opening a door, pausing to stay—it traces how architecture is perceived by the body and retained as memory. The wind and light of Jeju, the texture of basalt, entering the body together with space: architecture existing not as form, but as bodily experience.

아산의학관(Asan Medical Hall)

The renovation of Asan Medical Hall began with the existing building—its structure, scale, and the traces of many years of use. Rather than erase the character of the former cultural facility, the project asked what should be kept, what needed to change, and how the building could better support medical education today.

The program and circulation were reorganized around the daily movement of students, faculty, and researchers. Main routes were made clearer, visual connections were opened, and shared spaces were used to link the library, teaching areas, and research facilities.

The exterior was renewed with white granite and ceramic louvers. The louvers break down the long glazed façade and add depth between the interior and the city. They reduce the heavy, dated appearance of the building while retaining its original scale and presence.

Inside, warm white surfaces, wood finishes, and controlled transparency create a softer academic environment. The new spatial sequence supports both focused study and informal exchange, while keeping the relationship between public, teaching, and research areas clear.

This was not simply a matter of preserving the old building or placing a new image over it. The project grew out of a series of decisions about what to retain, what to alter, and how to bring the existing building into a new educational setting. Through those decisions, the former cultural facility was transformed into Asan Medical Hall.

우리가 바라보는 '곶'(Dwelling in Gotjawal)

This project investigates how a dwelling can be situated on a site that directly meets an expansive and richly layered natural environment.
In this context, the act of placing a building is understood not simply as locating a form on land, but as framing the lines of sight through which the inhabitant perceives and ultimately dwells within the landscape.
Seeing becomes an initial mode of inhabiting—defining how the body enters, adjusts, and becomes gradually absorbed into this environment.

The project begins with the ground itself: the texture of the earth under one’s feet, the slight rise and dip of the terrain, and the shifting density of the forest that frames each step.
As one approaches the entrance, the threshold becomes a moment of transition—opening the door unfolds the body into a space where interior and exterior are held in a loosely connected continuum.
Perception and bodily presence unfold together, allowing dwelling to emerge from a continuity of vision, movement, and atmosphere.

Within this modest scale, a wide spectrum of everyday sensations is carefully condensed.
The relaxed bend of the body finding its posture; the wind brushing through layers of trees; the subtle collision of leaves carried by the forest’s airflow; the blue sky widening above one’s gaze as light filters through the canopy—these ordinary yet vivid scenes form the experiential foundation of the house.
The dwelling becomes a vessel that gathers these temporal rhythms, holding them in a spatial framework that remains open, porous, and deeply connected to its surrounding landscape—an architecture in which seeing becomes dwelling.

우리동네옆집(Our Nextdoor)

I began by reflecting on the act of building a house.
When someone finally builds the home they have long dreamed of, does that process also offer a sense of hope or possibility to the people around them? Paradoxically, construction inevitably accompanies a form of destruction, and I wondered whether there might still be a way for the process—even in small moments—to make others a little happier.

This project takes its name from that question: “Our Next Door.”
I hoped that one small house in our neighborhood could become a welcoming house—a place whose presence quietly brightens the adjacent homes and gently shifts how the surroundings are perceived. A home built for cherished people should also be recognized as a good place by others who pass by or live nearby.

What makes a detached house compelling is not the need to adapt to a pre-given space, but the ability to inhabit spaces shaped by one’s own sense of use and meaning. This house embraces that charm—a home that grows through the intentions of its residents and offers a warm, modest sense of hospitality to its neighborhood.

리듬(Rhythm, 音)

Rhythm(音) is located in a quiet mid-mountain village in Jeju, where scattered houses, stone walls, and loosely defined paths form a landscape of gentle intervals. Rather than imposing a dominant presence, the project settles into this context through three elongated volumes—a stay, a workspace, and a residence—arranged in a low horizontal sequence aligned with the village’s understated rhythm. Each building carries a distinct function, yet no explicit hierarchy is imposed, allowing the ensemble to remain perceptually balanced within the broader landscape.

A central intention was to understand how boundaries might operate not as fixed separations, but as conditions that shift with movement and position. Paths, thresholds, and gaps are designed with calibrated looseness, so their perception changes as one moves through the site. Openings frame everyday alignments—light across stone walls, wind-bent vegetation, and subtle changes in terrain—allowing the landscape to enter the experience of the interior.

Rather than prescribing fixed functions, the project offers spaces whose meaning is completed through use. Each building embodies a different tempo—contemplative, active, or domestic—while transitions between them remain continuous. The architecture is read through the body: stepping across low thresholds, encountering softened edges, and moving through sequences that register as memory. Rhythm(音) is not defined by form, but by the relationships between volumes, and by the quiet cadences of movement within them.

Floating Station

Set along an ordinary coastal promenade, the project inserts a new kind of station into a familiar stretch of walking—not a destination to arrive at, but a pause held within the flow of the walk. Rather than asserting itself as a landmark, it works to hold a particular image: a recognizable presence that gives the everyday path a place to settle, without the weight of a monument.
Its program—a café and a small retail space—turns the very logic of a station inside out. A station is ordinarily a point of transit, somewhere passed through; here it becomes a place to stay, however briefly, gathering drifting footsteps along the shoreline and slowing them to rest.
This sense of floating is built rather than merely suggested. The terrain already rises about 1.5 meters above the promenade, and the building is lifted further from this ground; a cantilevered floor plate then reaches out beyond the slope, so that the station reads as though it hovers above the shore. Concrete louvers wrap the volume, and as light moves through them across the day, the falling light and shadow compose ever-shifting scenes and atmospheres—each moment of pause framed by a different quality of light.

인디펜던트(Independent)

Independent is an adaptive reuse project that transforms an aging lodging facility that had outlived its original purpose. The former program, along with architectural elements and finishes that prescribed a particular image, was removed, leaving the building’s basic structure exposed. Marks produced during demolition, including scars on the rough wall surfaces and traces of red spray paint, were left uncovered rather than concealed beneath new finishes.

In a rapidly changing architectural climate, assigning a new use that responds only to present demands may simply create another expiration date. Rather than fixing the building to a complete and predetermined program, the project treats architecture as a framework that can accommodate different forms of use and allow time to accumulate.

The building stands facing the sea in Aewol, Jeju. Over the years it has stood there, the memories of those who looked out at the sea from the same place, through the same frame, may also have accumulated within it. The original windows and views therefore serve as a framework that brings together memories formed at different moments in time.

The meaning of the space is not defined in advance. Some may contemplate the sea, some may pause before a painting, and others may remain in conversation. As different activities take place within each of the divided rooms, the theme of the space gradually emerges, becoming complete when the lights of all the rooms come together as a single scene.

Rather than applying a new image to the existing building, Independent proposes a form of regeneration that removes elements likely to become obsolete and leaves behind a structure in which past memories, present use, and time can continue to accumulate.

반딧불(Firefly)

The Firefly Project is a small architectural intervention located on a corner in downtown Jeju, conceived as a quiet beacon that gathers people. Like a small light that softly illuminates its surroundings in the dark, the project catches the eye within the urban flow and gently draws passersby to pause. The lightness of the structure is expressed through carefully selected materials and detail. Rather than forming a heavy enclosure, the architecture remains visually open and approachable, allowing the space to function as a small urban node where anyone can easily step in and linger for a moment.

애월공방주택(Workshop House Aewol)

Aewol Workshop House began with a question: can an existing house expand in response to changes within a family?

Drawing on the familiar Jeju arrangement of angeori and bakgeori, the project combines renovation and extension to create a living structure for two generations. One of the existing storage buildings was converted into a workshop house, while another part of the site was developed as a separate residential space. This allows the client’s family and parents to live independently while remaining closely connected.

The approach from the village road through the olle path and into the house is organized as a gradual sequence. Openness and enclosure shift along this route, creating protected indoor and outdoor areas between the two households. These shared spaces allow family members to meet naturally without compromising the privacy of each home.

The project retains traces of the existing buildings while reorganizing the distance and connection between family members. Through this process, it explores how Jeju’s familiar residential structure can continue within the life of a contemporary family.

월정소굴(Wol-jeong Nook)

Woljeong Sogul is a residential and stay project located in a small village set back from Woljeong Beach. Within a limited site, the project brings together a protected home for the family and an independently operated stay, allowing the two programs to coexist while maintaining their own privacy and patterns of use.

The building is composed of low, simple volumes that follow the horizontal character of the surrounding landscape. A restrained palette of materials and colors allows the architecture to sit quietly within the village rather than stand apart from it.

Rather than separating the two programs as isolated buildings, the project connects them through paths, yards, and eaves. In this way, the residence and the stay remain independent while still belonging to the same place.

The Body Remembers the Step

Before architecture, there were steps made by the land. On sloping terrain, people lived by climbing and descending, and the sensation etched into the body through that repeated movement became the architectural step. A step is not a difference in height; it is a rhythm of the body.
The land of Jeju is never flat. Stone walls layer themselves along the slope that runs from Hallasan to the sea, and the olle paths bend with the terrain. On this island, steps were everywhere—the single rise from the courtyard into the angeori, the stone ledge between one field and the next, the grade of the road climbing from the port to the village. People crossed these heights with their bodies every day, and that sensation became, without conscious recognition, the structure of life itself.
To work with steps in architecture is not to design height but to attune the way a body experiences space. When one ascends a single step, the line of sight shifts; when one descends, the depth of space changes. A step is at once a boundary and a transition. It divides territories without walls and distinguishes inside from outside without doors. It is the oldest language architecture speaks to the body.
This film documents that language. Through the everyday acts of pausing, climbing, sitting, and looking down upon a step, it traces how architectural steps are perceived by the body and retained in memory.

간절곶 스테이(Commercial Space and Stay)

Located near Ganjeolgot in Ulsan, the project brings together a commercial space and a stay within a single building. Although the two programs are connected at ground level as one structure, the difference in elevation between the front and rear of the site allows them to read as two distinct volumes with different characters.

The street-facing front is opened through transparency to strengthen its connection to the public realm, while the stay is placed toward the higher rear portion of the site, where views and circulation are controlled to secure privacy for the accommodation spaces.

The two programs are further differentiated through varying degrees of openness, circulation, and spatial depth, while a consistent material and formal language unifies the building as a whole. This arrangement allows the openness of the front and the privacy of the rear to coexist within a single building.