Gimpo Hupyeong-ri Residence II

This site lies just below the plot where a house I had designed a year earlier stands. It is a long north-south site, with rice paddies about three meters lower to the east and pear orchards across a narrow lane to the west.

On first encountering the site, I wanted to relate it somehow to the house built earlier to the north. It was an architect's one-sided wish, but this was to be a home for three — an elderly mother who had farmed all her life, and her grown daughter and son. There were no particular demands, only that construction be completed within the given budget.

As I later learned, the earlier house too had come to me by chance: a local Gimpo real-estate agent had been involved from site selection through construction, and a clash between the agent, who insisted on a sloped roof, and the client, who wanted a different form, sent the project my way.

This time as well, the same agent was involved throughout, hoping to secure the construction rights in return, so countless alternatives, models, and 3D renderings had to be produced.

The first proposal inserted a short vertical element into the middle of a long linear mass, but it conflicted with the insistence on a sloped roof for reasons hard to accept. So many alternatives arose because the initial differences in formal intent ran that deep, and the final scheme ended up, after all, as a sloped-roof form.

A single large gable serves as the main mass, with smaller gables and a low flat slab added east and west — a plan to secure view and light along the long north-south site. It was a project with a great many difficulties, positive and negative alike, arising in the design process.