Dwelling Drawing Breath

Speculative design for the future of dwelling: invited contribution for NEXT HOME SEOUL

Year: 2017

Team: Anca Matyiku and Chad Connery

Publications: Next Home Seoul (OCDI Press, 2017).

Dwelling Drawing Breath is our contribution to the Next Home Seoul project, which examines the question of ‘living’ and interiority in Seoul as a critical architectural assignment.

Dwelling Drawing Breath is a transposition of our curiosity for Korea’s long-lasting tradition of fermentation and pickling onto ideas about urban dwelling in Seoul. The project is conceived around the large human-scaled earthenware pots known as ‘onggi’, which are often described as “breathing pottery”: Their microporous structure makes them ideal for fermentation as well as food storage. We see an elemental resonance between onggi and the idea of mass housing in densely populated urban centers:  both have been called upon to satisfy rudimentary yet essential functions of living. This seems to be very much in tune with the provocation of this project’s brief—to consider ‘living’ “as an architectural assignment, beyond and before the traces of commercial and personal paraphernalia.” 

We were inspired by how the onggi vessel responds to these quotidian necessities with an unassuming elegance. Because it has been part of Korean daily life for millennia, onggi has accrued a richly layered presence in the collective imagination. We were compelled to generate spatial speculations about dwelling units by proposing contemporary interpretations inspired by this familiar presence of onggi earthenware.