The Korean Strait

Territory within territory | Type: Narrative, geography, subterranean urbanism. Year: 2017.

"The Korean Strait" is a proposal for an underground bath house situated within the Korean Demilitarized Zone, seeking to carve out spaces of agreement through confrontation.

Positioned along the actual border line dividing the territories of the two countries in conflict, the schematic layout of the internal programming follows the contours of the topography that the complex is submerged in, while the skylights are imprinted on the landscape, mapping the actual geographical reality that is continuous through the border. The main bathing area is composed of thirteen "chambers" with accompanying subsidiary spaces, ranging from salt rooms to cold plunge pools, arranged in a heterogeneous formation that turns the political dialogues of continuity and discontinuity that govern the realities above the ground into rich spatial experiences that value appropriation as a parameter within. The floor of the bath house replicates the contours of the topography sliced to make way for it, programmatically serving as a changing reference that accommodates the varying temperatures of the rooms, while conceptually being a shared topological ground. As a territorial inscription, the complex is imagined both as a social and literal infrastructure, coupling as a cistern and a heat sink, potentially reorienting the political geography that constructs the region; as echoed in the very tectonics of the hybrid construct from columns that carry water between the upper storage layer that composes the roof and the lower layer where active heating happens, to the topographical ground surface that acts as a geothermal layer.

The intentional misuse of the term “strait”, although it describes a different land condition, refers to the thickening of the border that is made possible conversely by its delamination into precise operative layers. Under the invisible border line, a shared exteriority emerges - a subterranean urbanism, a subversion. The project ultimately isn’t about removing the border, or merely about connecting people. Primary concern remains the coexistence of alternate realities, side by side, feeding off of one another. We claim that in a world where qualities of the likes of smoothness, or fluidity has become automated design reflexes, states of conflict, discontinuity, or friction still provide a latency for architectural intelligence to turn them into productive contradictions.

Project: Aykut Imer, Po-Jung Chen.