Stpmj Architecture Seoul and Brooklyn, NY

摘要

in the work of stpmj Architecture, things reveal themselves incrementally. The familiar becomes surprising as you turn a corner or come back a month later. The simple becomes complex as you move around or through it. When one approaches Shear House from the west, it appears as a straightforward, gabled elevation, made somewhat intriguing by an asymmetrical roof and a trio of rectangular punched openings. Nicely done, but we've seen this before-in Herzog & de Meuron's concrete House in Leymen, for example, and hundreds of imitations. Walk around it, though, and you discover a more sophisticated geometric game being played, as the roof slides over the south facade to form an angled eave that protects the glazed dining area below it and then shifts on the north side to create a second-story balcony. What seems at first to be monolithic turns out to be much more complex. A different kind of transformation happened this past summer on Jeju Island, where Seung Teak Lee and Mi Jung Lim, the husband-and-wife team behind stpmj, erected a freestanding barrel vault made of rock-salt bricks. In the warm and humid climate, the rock salt slowly dissolved, leaving just an arching framework of cement mortar.