Page 5. On the Creator's Representation of Space - 2
In 2012, I attended architect Ryu Chunsu's drawing exhibition held at the Seoul Arts Center. There was also a casual talk session where another invited architect had a conversational lecture with Ryu Chunsu, and during it, there was a brief discussion about the meaning of an architect's drawings. He said that the lines an architect draws contain a great deal of meaning—for instance, even when drawing a single stream of urine, there is much to consider. He explained that a line encodes the curvature of the stream bending under gravity, the force with which internal pressure propels the stream outward, and the phase of the substance comprising the urine (in this case, liquid).
Later, as I revisited this story, I realized that what Ryu Chunsu had described was merely the potential of drawing—he never claimed that drawing was the most effective method of representation. If you truly wanted to represent a stream of urine properly, you could, depending on the case, use photography or video, or run a simulation in 3D software with a built-in physics engine. In this context, I began to think that the media intensively taught in architecture schools might not always be the best means of representation for solving actual architectural problems, and I started looking for topics that appear to belong to the domain of architecture yet seem difficult to represent using what is taught in architecture courses.
Nest Building, Digital Fabrication
I believe this topic can be summarized by the following question.
Can the drawings and diagrams of architects taught in design studios represent how a bird's nest is constructed?
There are many fascinating points to consider through the construction of a bird's nest.
- The primary material of a nest is twigs. Hundreds or thousands of twigs are used in a nest, and each twig has a different shape.
- The nest is not built toward a fixed, predetermined final form. Construction ends when certain size and shape conditions are met.
- Because neither the final product nor the materials are fixed, the construction procedure cannot be clearly defined. Only the construction method exists.
If an architect is someone who proposes ways of creating space by erecting physical structures, then the topic above certainly falls within the domain of architecture. I believe digital fabrication is a field where many interesting attempts related to this have been made. Numerous studies have been conducted worldwide, and I would like to bring up two works that left a strong impression on me.
ICD Aggregate Pavilion 2015
Rock Print: A Manistone
A World Unbound by Physical Laws: Virtual Space
Two sub-topics can be considered under this theme.
The Architect's Model
The reason architecture students build scale models, photograph them, draw plans, and produce rendered images is ultimately to better understand the space that will eventually be built and to communicate that understanding to others. But if that is truly the goal, wouldn't creating a 1:1 scale model and walking through it be the most reliable and effective way to understand a space? Perhaps it is only because building a space at 1:1 scale takes too much time and money that we settle for smaller models and seek out other representation techniques.
If the question raised above is valid, then any method that allows experiencing a space at 1:1 scale—provided the time and cost of creating such an environment are reasonable—could serve as a substitute for physical models. And this is, in fact, already happening through technological advancement. I've heard that students are already loading 3D software models into game engines like Unity or Unreal Engine and enabling walkthrough experiences via HMDs (head-mounted displays) for graduation exhibitions. If this approach becomes more widespread, there may no longer be any need to cut foam board to build physical models.
Non-Physical Space
If we could experience space through means other than physically walking or moving through it, could this too be considered a problem within the domain of architecture? More specifically, if the architecture we have discussed thus far has been based on experiences within physically existing spaces using our own bodies as interfaces, then in an era where we can have experiences in non-physical spaces using interfaces other than our own bodies, can we speak of a new kind of architecture?
Already in 2025, we navigate cities based on real-time information from map applications installed on our smartphones, find our next destinations through search engines, or decide based on advertisements served to us by recommendation algorithms. Representing only the physical form of a city or building is no longer sufficient to capture the full experience of the actual city and its buildings. In an age where increasingly personalized information is provided, what new methods of representation must we devise to express the kinds of experiences people can have in the spaces they use?