Architect：FHHH FRIENDS

Location：248 Noksapyeong-daero, Itaewon 2(i)-dong, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea; | ;

Project Year：2019

Category：Bars;Restaurants

There are sights that fill you up just by looking at it. Sights such as green trees, sweet wine, fresh youth, pouring sunlight, and joyful laughter… These sights are pleasant because we all have a sense of desire for abundance. Abundance is a story of a once-upon-a-time and in order to enjoy this fleeting moment, humans plant trees, tend the garden and lie under the shade.

I wonder how one would enjoy a sense of abundance in a parched city. The size of one’s house, the number imprinted on one’s bank account, and a decent name card that is in one’s wallet… People of this generation feel a sense of abundance through things that are useful in the pragmatic sense. Although it is hard to admit it, we are living in a generation where superficial numbers and text are what have become useful, and at the same time we are living in a generation where we are in denial of this truth.

Perhaps things such as green trees, overflowing wine, fresh youth, and pouring sunlight should now be considered as archaic ways of thinking about abundance. In old European cities, these archaic ways are still to be found. The kind of lush green grass one would stumble upon, neglected corners where fresh water would flow through aged pipes… It is important that people don’t forget the abundance one feels when stumbling upon a seemingly indifferent yet calming places. One could think that planting trees and installing a fountain might give a sense of abundance, but this is not the ideal approach.

Unlike the kind of feeling you get from European cities as explained above, Seoul is quite different.

The kind of Seoul you would meet when coming out of a store is tall trees that line up along the sides of the roads, chubby high-rise buildings, jet-black coat and evenly sized blocks on the sidewalk. Developing a fond for something that one doesn’t have inevitably makes one depressed.

It is said that in ancient Persia they once weaved carpets with motifs found from nature. After extracting elements from nature, they would weave these as patterns, where they would sit on the finished carpet afterwards. They used their methods in order to commemorate and freeze a moment in time. The commemoration that happens in ‘NaturalHigh’ is a moment of a happenstance encounter with a lush garden that gives you a feeling of abundance. Similar to how the Persiansused thread and dyes to imitate nature, ‘NaturalHigh’ used stones, steel, and chiseled concrete in order to express atmospheres found in nature. 

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