Our 16h stop is at aoa (Seoul, South Korea) to meet Jaewon Suh. To say “aoa” is the same as to say "architecture of anyone, anything and anywhere”.

For aoa, architecture is nothing. “When I say that architecture is nothing, it means that it is a very fundamental thing”, like air, for example. 

As a reaction to  Valerio Olgiaty ’s “non-referencial architecture”, a self-explanatory “hiper-referencial architecture”. “I want to be inspired by our reality not ideality”.

Feel free to see a cat / a minecraft game / a Sol LeWitt’s sculpture, where there is a house. “To the children, my building looks like an ice cream. It’s a way to connect people and architecture.”

“I think autonomy of architecture has to be destroyed by our culture” and as you listen to this conversation you’ll understand the meaning of these strong words. “Some banal things destroy order but I intentionally use these things as a satire of society.”

In the end “the most important thing is how to organize the elements with each other to make a system. (…) Architects make a building using a column, a slab, a stair…very fundamental elements. We only do that.”

Guest: Jaewon Suh, aoa  (Seoul, South Korea)

Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)

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