Architects:100A associates

Area :48 m²

Year :2020

Photographs :Jae Yoon Kim

Lead Architects :Kwang-il An, Sol-ha Park, Dong-su Kim

City : Gangseo-gu

Country : South Korea

From when did you hesitate to tell about your dream? If the works we're doing allow them to approach their dream, we really want you to tell us about the story of the dream, like a dreaming child. Although there are so many factors for us to decide on a project and we can’t ignore realities, we would like to share our attitude toward the size and space of their dream and prioritize how much pleasure we can feel in the project.

At the end of the narrow street of Banghwa-Dong, there is this little piece of land barely over 29.8m2, surrounded by buildings that seem to have eventful stories. Perhaps we decided to start this project to enjoy the pleasure. A new challenge always makes us excited, but we should also consider realities. However, his way to treat this land and our thought that we’re eager to realize some kind of tiny touch or expectation of someone who showed us his dream, might remove those concerns. Actually, we have talked a lot and come through so many difficulties together. Despite this, the reason why we don’t feel easy to define ‘him’ with a typical disposition is not that we don’t understand ‘his’ disposition, but the emotion we’re now feeling from him is real ‘himself’.

By the time we started writing this story, he sent us a long letter including his thoughts and personal disposition toward this house, reminding us again that he’s a novelist. He introduced himself as ‘a child of a complex character who follows love and is full of curiosity, but careful in attitude, emotional, and sensitive, and also deliberate and persistent, but very shy and has a lot of worries’ and there were his earnest and detailed wishes, asking us to make a castle within where the true himself is able to hide, in the letter. Therefore, the space needed to be a small castle to protect him from the outside and we worked with the wish that it would be a resting place to calm down his tired body and mind.

A rough and firm texture and vertical format are good enough as a small castle to protect him. However, we applied fairly-tale colours (maybe) on the house in harmony with the buildings that seem to have eventful stories around it because we felt the colours resembled his aura, an adult in appearance but there’s a child inside of him.

The four stories are barely over 9.9m2 each. We tried to design the building to have the minimum function – but work very well – and make rich stories in the small spaces beyond the function. We intended to use even a tiny space and also tried not to make it unnatural. We did not use the window only as a tool for expansion, and according to the characteristic of the space, the light needed and the one giving calm were divided and arranged. With this setting, the client can make a choice of hiding or being seen anywhere. Particularly, the fourth floor is a dining room where he spends most of his time as well as a working space where he’s able to concentrate. We wanted him to feel the silence, calm, and even a transcendental feeling out of reality through the light coming from the skylight.

At the end of this article, we dare think the meaning of the space will be a small castle where he can calm down his tired body and mind after daily battles in life, for the child who had to be strong in order not to be hurt in this beautiful and fierce city.

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