Minsuk Cho: Architecture as a way of life

Born in 1966 in Seoul, Minsuk Cho spent his childhood amidst the numerous construction sites that were shaping the topography of South Korea’s capital in a time of unprecedented transformation and rapid growth. His 95-year-old father, also an architect, taught him that architecture is not really a profession, but a way of life. Cho’s buildings are designed as social machines, engaging with collectivity, our senses, and temporalities. This interview traces his unique journey through New York and Rotterdam before he returned to South Korea in 2003 to open his firm, Mass Studies.

Spanning a variety of scales and programs, recent works include the French Embassy in Korea and the Won Buddhism Wonnam Temple, both in Seoul; a radical public housing project for 100 units atop a flood prevention infrastructure close to the Han River; and the 23rd Serpentine Pavilion in London. Titled Archipelagic Void, it recently opened to the public in Kensington Gardens, and will host a 5-month program of events and artistic interventions.

Among his dream projects, there are two that he hopes to realize in the near future—a joint architecture exhibition by North and South Korea, envisioned as a space for the healing of historical traumas and a model for peaceful coexistence; and a seed bank and knowledge library to be set in a vast territory that was originally established in 1953 to separate the two countries, and that is now an accidental nature sanctuary.

Minsuk Cho: In Seoul, at the time, architecture was part of the engineering school. It was a very rigorous, technical education still based on the principles from the early 20th century Japanese colonization and influenced by German and UK systems: with lots of math and physics. But I would say that this technocratic approach was also productive, as architecture intersects various disciplines—science, liberal arts, nature, and culture.

Moving to Columbia was an exciting change. I studied there from 1989 to 1992, during Bernard Tschumi’s early years as Dean of Columbia GSAPP, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. It was just after the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which included Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry among the seven emerging architects presented, and Tschumi was also one of them. What I found very inspiring, though, is how he was leading the school: cultivating a diverse ecosystem of architectural thought, bringing together people from various cultures and perspectives. As someone from the Far East, this exposure to different views, approaches and ways of doing architecture was incredible. 

After graduate school, I worked with James Stewart Polshek at Polshek and Partners in New York. Polshek was the Dean at Columbia GSAPP before Bernard Tschumi, and it was he who brought in Kenneth Frampton—an important mentor and influence for me.

MCH: I joined OMA from 1996 to 1998. We were around 30 people at the beginning and 100 when I left. Quite like Tschumi at Columbia, Rem Koolhaas engaged with diverse areas and fields, creating a dynamic ecosystem which gave us an overview of the world, regardless of how fragmented that can be. My two and a half years there really felt like five or seven. I first worked on the master plan for Universal Studios in Los Angeles. We would visit the project quite often, with free access to all the theme park facilities, cinemas, shopping malls, and hotels. It was an exciting project.

Later on, I worked on two museum projects in Korea: the Seoul National University Museum of Art and the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art. These projects were both in Seoul, but in very different contexts. The process of working on both simultaneously was very rewarding. Then, one of my last projects at OMA was a competition for the master plan of the Icheon Song-Do New Town, an ambitious project based on the premise of reclaiming this large portion of land to create a new IT and logistics hub of Northeast Asia. This was probably OMA’s largest project at the time, but before the competition concluded I had already decided to move back to New York to start my own practice.

MCH: The 2014 Architecture Biennale in Venice was the first time Korea held a competition for the role of the pavilion’s commissioner and co-curator, and I was invited to participate. Rem Koolhaas encouraged all national pavilions to explore 100 years of its country’s modernity, from 1914 to 2014. Given Korea’s history, I felt it was essential to include both North and South Korea in the narrative, despite my limited knowledge of the North. In 1914 Korea was still one nation under Japanese colonial rule. We didn’t want to leave out the other half of the story but rather create a narrative for the entire peninsula.

Initially, my plan was to foster direct collaboration with North Korean architects by sending letters through diplomatic channels, aiming for a historic joint exhibition. But due to time constraints and the complexity of such a high-level decision, this evolved into a broad network of architects, artists, thinkers, poets, and filmmakers interested in both Koreas. This approach brought together many individuals who had known of each other but never met, creating a genuine sense of camaraderie and community. This network continued to collaborate in various other locations, like Helsinki and New York. There were also many great coincidences, for instance the Italian ambassador introduced me to the work of Milanese photographer Alessandro Belgiojoso, who had exhibitions in both North and South Korea. And it was him who then facilitated a visit of the North Korean ambassador to the pavilion in Venice. He was impressed with the exhibition and our balanced and respectful portrayal of North Korean architecture and urban strategies. Architecture can be a very important tool, in a way it’s a window from which we can look at each other.

MCH: Soon after I started to work with Korean artist Jae-Eun Choi, on a project proposed for the demilitarized zone (DMZ), a 300-kilometer-long and 4-km-wide buffer created after the Korean War in 1953. This territory, untouched by humans for 70 years, is an outcome of tragic circumstances and has become a thriving ecosystem, and a connection among the two Koreas—and two realities inhabited by humans and nature. Together with a group of architects, artists, scientists, we considered ways to preserve this unique natural habitat, an accidental by-product of geopolitics, and my proposal was to convert a military tunnel discovered in the 1970s into a seed bank. We took this underground linear void to transform it into a space, a vault, to preserve the life (nature) and knowledge (data) of the DMZ ecology.

MCH: Yes, voids are crucial tools in architecture, not just as empty spaces. I’m drawn to their unprescribed nature.

MCH: Indeed, as a 5-year-old kid, I was running around construction sites, with no safety controls, climbing mountains of gravel and exploring the messy environments. I loved this “in-the-making”, artificial topography of Seoul. It deeply influenced my perception of architecture and urban spaces.

MCH: That’s a great observation. In the early 1970s South Korea was poorer than North Korea, and as a child I’ve witnessed the entire spectrum of economic growth and its rapid acceleration in the 1980s and 90s. When I returned to Korea in 2003, it felt like a sequel to the tabula rasa situation from earlier on. Things were done quickly, haphazardly, then taken down just as quickly, and new high-rise structures were built everywhere. That period was unique because, unlike post-war Europe or America, Korea had this explosive urbanizing energy in some places—while other areas were shrinking and rebuilding. It was a dynamic of opposites unfolding simultaneously. This is why Korean architecture varies so much—some parts of the city were being built anew, almost like Singapore, with beautifully planned new icons and brand-new cities. Having said this, I’m increasingly skeptical about whether we need such rapid development. The attitude has definitely changed. Alongside those continuing developmental energies, there is a stronger emphasis on using materials sensibly and considering the long-term impact of our constructions. But for me, from my childhood experience of living in modern, brutalist architecture, you had to adapt quickly: from small villages to this kind of “Unité d’Habitation”—modern cities with megaform buildings. Despite living in brand-new, undecorated, concrete buildings, I felt a strong sense of community. Those are still strong memories from my childhood.

Although Korea is now creating very modern and dense, ecological, and sustainable, and dealing with different sites of the city and the non-city, by which I mean rural areas, we face different challenges and opportunities. For instance, Korea’s mountainous terrain often dictates high-density projects in its few available valleys. Regardless of the scale—be it high-rise towers or small farming pavilions—architecture is a vital tool for society.

MCH: Exactly. The challenge is to create dense environments that are engaging and capable of reflecting the diversity of their communities, rather than imposing uniformity that makes people feel disconnected.

MCH: In a way it is a small project indeed, but it was a very important one for me. It took us a month to prepare the proposal.

MCH: Hans Ulrich Obrist gave me this book, a little book called The Archipelago Conversations, which is a collection of conversations with Édouard Glissant. But I didn’t read it right away because I was  busy making design proposals. Our idea for the pavilion was basically to keep the center as a void and look at the periphery as a site for multiplicity to take place. Then, two days before the submission, I started reading this book and I was like: Wow, this is what we did, actually! So, then I changed the title to Archipelagic Void as a thank you note to Hans Ulrich.

MCH: Archipelago means there is more than one island and that there is an in-between space. Depending on where you approach it from, you discover different elements, but they are united by this space in-between. No matter where they come from, people merge in the central void which functions like an urban roundabout – but instead of cars, it has been designed for pedestrians. We wanted to introduce a version of madang, the courtyard found in traditional Korean houses—those are empty spaces, but replete with intangible stories and possibilities.

In discussing 20th-century architecture, there’s a focus on the idea of a completed utopia, exemplified by Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion from 1914. These structures were often presented as universes, complete worlds, and quite like spaceships with phantasmagoric interiors. A lot of contemporary pavilions continue this tradition. However, Glissant’s perspective in the 21st century offers a different view: he described it as an era of “incomplete utopia”. Our pavilion embraces this notion of open-endedness, with 120 possible configurations, which represents a form of a dynamic, but not infinite, flexibility. Glissant also spoke of a “trembling utopia,” which has a poetic resonance of imperfection and movement.

What particularly inspired me in this concept was a description by the Korean poet, Kim Hyesoon, which you’ll find in the catalog that will come out in September. She writes about the fist slowly opening up to reveal five fingers. This metaphor brilliantly captures our pavilion’s essence. The fist symbolizes completeness, yet it also carries a sense of constraint or tension. As it opens up, it transitions into a state of opportunity and openness, reflecting our pavilion’s philosophy of evolving and adapting—rather than being a fixed, finite structure.

MCH: We have ten walls dividing the site in a radial way, but each wall also serves as a bench. You can sit inside the covered area or outside, sometimes both. Some walls allow both sides to do that, so it actually creates diverse spaces, yet it’s all connected and continuous. That’s the important idea because it demonstrates how we can promote diversity as a key value in our society. We often talk about diversity, but in reality, the world is very segregated. We have these echo chambers on the internet, which started in the early 2000s, the same time as the Serpentine Pavilion series; we thought we were connected, but in a way, it has become worse with algorithmic ghettos. So, we wanted to use architecture to show that maybe this naive idea can be possible or at least demonstrate it through this opportunity. That idea was always in the back of my head.

MCH: Architecture is a tool. Now, much of it has become about the dominating visual culture. So people are visually consuming more than ever. But architecture is the only thing that is not downloadable because it deals with the five senses and with the dimension of time. Its important role has been always that of connecting people, connecting physically different spaces, and different temporalities. Architecture, for me, is more than creating buildings; it must have a bigger purpose. That’s the ambition of architecture.

MCH: Our pavilion has a unique setup that argues for the less wasteful way of creating this endeavour: built from locally sourced timber, it allows it to be fully dismantled and reassembled in 120 different combinations. It is on the one hand, adaptable to various sites, on the other a site-specific response with each wing serving a unique purpose based on its location: one wing deals with the Serpentine South, almost capturing it with the big Auditorium. Two wings, the Play Tower and Tea House, address the eastern side where most people approach by car. Another wing, the Gallery, includes a sound installation. The north side has no approach due to a fence, so we situated the Library there.

MCH: I have always had an interest in how we live together, but we haven’t done many private homes. It’s more about collectivity. Of course, we’ve done a few things here and there, but a lot of houses we did were for people who wanted their homes to become more than just a house. Like artists’ studios combining workspaces and living spaces. We’ve done projects for a neuroscientist friend with 20,000 books and even a small house museum for a design director with a big art collection, allowing her to share her collection while living there. But the public sector is much more interesting. Right now, one project under construction is a young social incubator where recent graduates can live for eight to ten years. It’s a 100-studio apartment building built on top of a public infrastructure—a flood prevention facility near a tributary of the Han River. This facility is needed only for about six hours a year during emergencies, so the city decided to combine it with housing. The building will have co-working spaces, a gym, and other social programs that the neighbors can also use. It’s a unique premise, and we’re excited about it.

MCH: Recently, Lina Bo Bardi has been a revelation to me. I only knew about her from books until I visited São Paulo in 2016. Her work was different from what I had understood, with her unique vision and methodology. She was not that modernist canonical token female architect. Her engagement with surroundings, whether in the topography of Casa Vidro, with the fantastic courtyard and the grounded house with the pizza ovens, was truly inspiring. Philosopher Gayatri Spivak had a term called “affirmative sabotage”, which resonated with me. The architecture in the Northern Hemisphere counted on a transatlantic dialogue between Europe and the US, but all the other areas of Asia and South American parts I have been interested in as well, and Bo Bardi’s approach was particularly enlightening for me. I hope to soon visit Bahia and continue my research.

MCH: Home is where you can be yourself comfortably, maybe. Recently we completed a Buddhist temple. I thought I designed a temple, but I realized I designed a home for 250 people. They’re not just fulfilling their spiritual practice, but they’re doing household duties and really care about their space, and that was a very moving thing to see. I think ideally a house should be that way.

MCH: Yeah, you belong, and you have a sense of ownership, and a civil society naturally forms.