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Architects: 100A associates
- Area: 249 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Jae Yoon Kim
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Manufacturers: A-sang, E plus, Sunilwood, Vista, samhwa
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Lead Architects: Kwang-il An, Sol-ha Park
The Temple of Tiger for Recovery, Chwihoga - I have read an article, ‘There is only one place among the infinite points on the earth. Therefore, places have the power to make architecture special’. Most of my own work styles are started with the previously cited article, ‘Places have the power to make architecture special.’ My heart for the land (a specific place) before the construction of Chwihoga was a distant silence, it was the tranquility of silence and no-causality of being stored something that will unexpectedly overthrow my mind and body. My deep impression of the site might be a human response to the ‘vitality of place’ carved deep into the ground, regardless of how much it’s washed.
The site is a village named ‘Beomuri’ because tigers often climbed on a large rock in front of the village and howled a long time ago, and currently, it is in a place called ‘Homyeongri’, surrounded by Byeongdusan Mountain, Dutasan Mountain, and Odaesan Mountain. In the site where the traces of tigers that crossed the folds of the mountains scattered the span of time, I dared to record the story of ‘the temple of a tiger where we gain the energy of restoration through staying’. When designing the space, the first things coming to my mind were ‘Songhamaenghodo’ (a painting of a fierce tiger under a pine tree) and ‘Jukhamaenghodo’ (a painting of a fierce tiger under a bamboo) by Danwon Kim Hongdo. The pine forest and bamboo forest in the two paintings respectively are meaningful as a place of meditation and enlightenment.
If there was an implicit meaning in building this space between the host and me, perhaps it was a ‘place of meditation and enlightenment. Here, the tiger becomes the existence that reflects on itself, the substance of the source. Like this concept in ‘Songhamaenghodo’ and ‘Jukhamaenghodo’ by Danwon Kim Hongdo implies the meaning of the infinite space that transcends the boundaries of the screen and leads to the eternal world of meditation, that is, the act erasing all artificial obstacles and immersed in, ‘muwi’, I hoped that the architecture of this land would be a place of ‘muwi’ where the people who stay here can purify themselves, restore their original naturalness, and gain the energy of restoration.
The space that exists with this concept pursued the blank and plainness (Lao-tzu’s idleness naturalism) to create the circulation of the mind through the circulation of nature’s vitality. The sloping land creates a horizontal axis, organizing a scene where the folds of the mountains and the boundaries of the spaces intersect beyond the place, a long axis that denies the boundaries and crosses the pond of projection that interacts with nature leads the movement to a large gap in the rock. The reason why I created a scene where the existence of muwi in the large gap of the rock is being between the trees and the rock, was to be beyond time and space, overwhelmed and with emptiness, to adapt from the time and space in the past and the present out of the night, out of the day, and out of the time, on the top of refined materials (dead trees and rocks). All of the spaces built on this site begin and end through these scenes' repetition and intersection.
Just as we could record the response from the place beyond time as a story of the temple of the tiger, I hope that those who stay here will also be able to feel the response and vitality in their lives.
* muwi: the act of erasing all artificial obstacles and being immersed in them.
