Modern House

While apartment construction sites record "becoming," the two-story house documents the "traces of dwelling." Through geometric rigor, the aged brickwork and facades reveal the material foundation of memory amidst the monumental shifts of the city.

In the 2025 open call, I presented the "Apartment Construction Site" series, capturing the raw, skeletal frameworks of a city in a constant state of flux. While my previous work focused on the anatomical recording of monumental structures—where the logic of capital and efficiency overrode the human scale—this year’s "Modern House" series turns its gaze toward the two-story Western-style houses. These structures, quintessential to Korean modern residential history, have been marginalized by the very vertical expansion documented in my earlier work. This shift represents more than a change in subject matter; it signifies an expansion of my artistic perspective from the "geometry of structure" to the "phenomenology of dwelling."

The "Modern House," once a symbol of middle-class aspirations in the late 20th century, is now drifting away from contemporary aesthetic standards, often dismissed as a "delayed space" that must inevitably be erased for high-rise developments. However, through my lens, these aged brick textures and solid facades are reborn as sites of resilient narrative. While the construction sites were cold, uninhabited landscapes revealing only the framework of future desires, these houses are current sanctuaries where the warmth of human life still permeates through the walls.

The overwhelming scale and mechanical precision of the construction site photographs have evolved in this series into the tactile details of weathered gates and layered exterior walls. These marginalized homes are not fossilized relics; their inhabitants continue to sustain their lives, resisting the frantic pace of modernization. By contrasting these two bodies of work, I seek to question the fundamental meaning of habitation—the importance of "placeness" where time is allowed to accumulate, a quality often missing in standardized apartments. This project serves both as an homage to the Korean modern architectural aesthetic and as a record of the human dignity that remains inviolable even within the vast machinery of the city.