The simplest question for judging good architecture

Lim Yeong-hwan 

The author is the dean of Hongik University's Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design and a professor of architecture.

Several summers ago, I was driving toward a small Swiss village to visit the Saint Benedict Chapel. As I turned onto a mountain road following Google Maps, I saw an older man watering his yard and stopped. He spoke to me, and I caught the word “Zumthor.” I had taken the wrong road.

I soon understood why. Google Maps had directed me onto a path barely wide enough for a motorcycle. The route he suggested was hardly easy either. After five minutes along a one-way road less than 3 meters (10 feet) wide beside a precipice, I finally reached the village.

The Alpine scenery was overwhelming. At the top of the landscape, on a sloping ridge, stood a small dark-shingled building: the Saint Benedict Chapel, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Known for making material, light, texture and atmosphere central to his work, Zumthor won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2009.

To me, the chapel’s plan resembled a leaf. Inside were only seven rows of seats. Wooden supports spread like veins through the walls and floor, making the building feel less constructed than grown from the ground. Larch shingles on the exterior had weathered differently in the sun, recording the passage of time. The son of a cabinetmaker, Zumthor understood wood’s grain and physical qualities early.

Years later, I lost my way again in Norway while seeking a pavilion by Snohetta, the Norwegian architecture firm that designed the Busan Opera House scheduled to open next year. Viewpoint Snohetta, built for observing wild reindeer, sits on a high plateau at the edge of Dovrefjell National Park. After the road ended, I walked, eventually following a distant stranger with a dog until the pavilion appeared.

No one was there. Though it was summer, the mountain air was chilly. Inside stood a small fireplace. Sitting on a gently curved wooden bench, I warmed myself while looking through a broad glass wall toward Snohetta, the mountain that gave the architecture firm its name.

What stayed with me was the warmth of the fire, the wooden seat and the silence. The architecture did not compete with Norway’s immense landscape. It simply created enough warmth for a person to pause there.

The two buildings shared something. The Saint Benedict Chapel is a tiny sanctuary filled with seven rows of seats, while the Norwegian pavilion is like a small room placed amid vast nature. Different in location and purpose, both seemed as though they had always belonged there. I had crossed the world, driven for hours and become lost to see architecture that could exist nowhere else.

Korea has such architecture too: Mandaeru Pavilion at Byeongsan Seowon in Andong, North Gyeongsang. From Mandaeru, the architecture itself does not command attention first. The Nakdong River flows through the open pavilion, while the cliffs of Mount Byeong stretch beyond it like a folding screen.

Mandaeru adds remarkably little to create this view. By leaving out walls and retaining only pillars and a roof, it makes room for the river, mountains, wind and light to enter. The landscape fills what the architecture leaves empty. Mandaeru is therefore incomplete without the Nakdong River and Mount Byeong. Move the structure elsewhere and its columns and floor could be reproduced, but it would already be different architecture.

What these three buildings share is not modesty but their relationship with place. Rather than becoming protagonists themselves, they make us see the nature already there anew. The place makes the architecture special, and the architecture, in turn, makes the place more special.

Looking back, what I remember most from architectural journeys is not architecture alone. Getting lost, encountering strangers and walking long distances remain in my memory as parts of the buildings themselves. Architecture can extend beyond its physical boundaries, binding landscape, people and time into a single memory.

Perhaps the simplest question for judging good architecture is this: Would it be the same if moved somewhere else?

Some architecture becomes whole only where it stands, embracing landscape, climate, light, wind and the accumulated time of those who have lived there. A place where even getting lost becomes part of the memory of architecture, long after the visit itself ends.

Are we building places like that today?