Modern architecture is considerably de-contextual. Broadly speaking, its dogma is to suppress the others except function. In this respect postmodernism is to restore the displaced past. But postmodernism fails to present the past creatively although it contextualizes architecture by itself.
How can we get out of the postmodern situation? In order to do, we could be dependent on contextualism which an English philosopher, Stephen Pepper suggested in 1960s. Now his theory is as useful as Deleuez's in architecture. Pepper's contextualism is applied to architecture. The summary is as follows.
The act of architecture is not to build an ideal object alone, but to gather qualitative things and make a historic event, in other words, architecture. Many qualitative things are harmoniously related to one another. They change themselves into a qualitative architecture which is in a harmony with a context.
This kind of an event is called ‘historic’ because of not representing the past event, in other words, the past architecture but presenting the present event, the present architecture that is suitable for the present context and intimates the direction of future architecture.
Functions, forms, sites and contexts must consist of textures (approximately grammars) with qualities (approximately meanings). Fusion, spread and change between them must come across. Functions, forms, sites and contexts are continuously and slowly interpenetrated. While the interweaving of functions, forms, sites and contexts happens, textures with qualities or qualities with textures are fused, spread and changed (We cannot appreciate quality without contrasting it with texture)
Each concept (quality, texture, context, fusion, spread, change, historic event) is explained through the following historical situation of the site selected at the workshop.
The site chosen at the workshop is the place that had been used as an government office in Yi Dynasty(1392 -1910) and was done as a city hall and recently a community center. The site in the center of Miryang city has been existed as a silent background.
The site selected at the workshop has a texture with a quality which has been changed during a long period. A site as a texture with a quality always takes a pattern. (we feel a quality through a pattern or a texture.) Before it became a government office, the site had gathered, fused, spread qualitative textures from the context. Functions, forms in the government office, its site and context had been interpenetrated into a quality with a pattern. When the office was changed into a city hall, Function, forms in it, its site and context were interweaved into a quality. An architecture preserved in a long historical period has the same but different textures. Because functions and technologies (forms) transform in each period, functions, forms, sites, and contexts are continuously, slowly, and newly interweaved into a quality or a mood. Conclusively, textures with qualities are presented as something creative. The accumulation of textures with qualities makes a mood. It is ‘historic event’ to make an old but new architecture that has preserved a temporality (the past-->the present<--the future) by embodying the mood of Miryang filed up in a long period. [Prof. Lee Dong-Eon, School of Architecture, Pusan National Univ.]

For more information please contact : samlih@pusan.ac.kr

Coordinator - LEE In-Hee, Professor, Pusan National University, Korea / E-mail : samlih@pusan.ac.kr, Persoanl Homepage : http://www.mnu.ac.kr/samlih/lee/