Nam June Paik Gallery

Seoul, Korea

(Competition project, 2003)

This project is for a gallery to display work by the Korean performance and video artist Nam June Paik. The brief for the competition included a requirement that the building incorporate a full-size reproduction of Paik’s studio in New York. In the project the dimension of the studio is used to set up a series of scan-lines, analogous to those on a television screen. These then interact with the contour lines of the site, as if they were an electromagnetic field. Through a process of distortion and re-screening, the gallery emerges as a zone of disturbance or intensification within the landscape continuum. It develops as a topographic architecture that responds to the scales and character of Paik’s work by providing both small intimate spaces and expansive field-like conditions with ambiguous and fluctuating boundaries. As well as designated areas for temporary and permanent installations, the building houses archival and educational facilities. Circulation between these is organised through a shifting series of ramps and tilted floor plates. At the top, the building’s roofscape is integrated with a proposed new system of routes and pathways that cross the surrounding hills.