The Preface of the Korean Edition

기술의 비약적 발달로 의식주 등 생활의 기본 욕구는 충족되었지만, 현대인들은 다양해진 요구와 성취 욕망을 충족하기 위해 스스로를 소진하고 있다. 경쟁이 세계로 확대됨이 따라 사람들은 자신의 능력을 극한으로 끌어올리기 위해 스스로를 끝없이 몰아세울 수밖에 없는 내면화된 강박증에 시달리고 있는 것이다. 결국 기술의 발달이 인간의 삶을 여류롭고 의미 있는 것으로 만들어 줄 것이라는 기대와 달리, 사색적 삶은 설 자리를 잃고 활동적인 삶만이 폭주하게 되었다. 높고 빽빽히 솟은 건물들과 빠르게 스쳐 지나가는 장면들 속에서 내가 놓친 줄도 모르고 있었던 것들. 그것은 어쩌면 나에게 말을 건네는 시간들, 내 목소리에 귀를 기울이는 시간들, 나 자신이었을지도 모른다. 해당 프로젝트에서 사용자는 구역(zone)이 깊어짐에 따라 스스로의 욕망(the wanting)을 차분히 바라볼 수 있도록 한다. 이것은 시간과 관계없이, '자기만의 방(a room of one's own)' 하나면 충분하다. 고립(isolation), 적막(silence), 외로움(loneliness)을 지나 다다른 자기만의 방에서 고독(solitude)이 내게 와 춤을 추자고 한다.

If architecture is to make space, then the room is the most direct form that can result from such a claim. The room is also a state of mind, that is the possibility to have one's own space for reflection. For this reason, the room becomes the quintessential image of interiority in a literal sense: being only with oneself. We argue that the architecture of rooms has always been a space of conflict between social norms and the possibility of being alone. The architecture of the room is the silent theatre in which the human being as an 'individual' has slowly emerged as both a social being and someone desperately trying to be oneself. The writer of <A Room of One's Own>, Virginia Woolf, links the room as individual space with the possibility for concentration. Thus, Woolf's Room of One's Own is a reminder of how to be alone. To talk about rooms therefore does not mean talking about autonomous spaces, but rather reflecting on the way in which social and economic conditions become evident in the way even one's own most intimate space is defined. The cubiculum is perhaps the ancestor of the 'personal room' where the architecture of domestic space approximated the intimate scale of the human body at rest. Thus, the cell is not just a single room but a small house for one person that includes a laboratory and a kitchen garden. The goal of the cell is to allow the monk to become an ascetic, someone who makes on her/his own life a constantly refined practice. As a result, this condition allowed the monks to live together but apart, with each being able to preserve. In this condition, they would be both isolated from and in contact with one another in idiorrhythmic clusters. Within the clusters, living together did not wholly imagine on the possibility of being alone. The single dweller room is thus the image of how personal freedom cannot be translated into the easy image of 'individualism' or 'retreat' within which the market today attempts to translate our sense of social exhaustion and longing for solitude. As both the early monks and dwellers of communal houses imagined by Meyer demonstrated, a room of one's own can only be claimed as a social condition for all, in which living together supports the possibility of being alone with oneself. Only this way the room becomes no longer a space for prescribed functions such as rest or work, but a tabula rasa* where any use is finally possible.

site plan : considering private spaces

ground plan

library basement plan and section

Layering of transitions

library with music station : old and new

detail joint structure

joint model

1:200 model