One Acre per Ten
I am an architect at Christ & Gantenbein in Basel, working on museum and civic buildings in a precision-driven, research-oriented practice.
I studied architecture at Kookmin University in Seoul (BArch, 2018), where I graduated as alumni representative and received the Alumni Representative Achievement Award, and I held the 30th T. S. Kim Architectural Fellowship in 2021. I completed a Master in Architecture II at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2022-2024); my thesis on floating collective housing received the James Templeton Kelley Thesis Prize with the highest honors, awarded by the Boston Society of Architects with the GSD architecture faculty.
That thesis is also why I am proposing this. It was a competent building in a genre I have come to distrust: climate adaptation delivered as a premium product, on water that used to be a workplace. The prize did not make the argument true. It gave me the standing to say what it left out - who had worked the ground, and who could afford to be there afterwards. My work has moved since then from designing new ground to reading inherited ground.
Alongside practice I write an essay series in Korean, published as @reyeonho, on architecture, authorship, and the distance between the people who make buildings and the people whose names stay on them. Writing it has taught me to be legible to readers who are not architects, which an audit of this kind will need.
I work between Korean training and European practice, in three languages and fully at home in none. In this method translation is not the obstacle. It is the instrument.
Between 1959 and 2007 European states dismantled the psychiatric asylum unevenly, by different means. Italy ordered its asylums closed in 1978 and took twenty-one years. Britain never ordered it; its last Victorian estates emptied in 2003. Germany and the Netherlands still operate theirs.
What came back was land: walled estates inside cities, released in no planned sequence. Nobody has counted it. There is no European audit of how much was released or what became of it: the estates were held by counties, municipalities and health ministries, and each was disposed of locally. One is now luxury housing: flats inside the listed asylum, and houses on the farm - 75 of its 119 acres - that the patients worked under the description of treatment, prescribed to paupers and not to patients who paid.
Certosa di Collegno is where I work: a Carthusian vow in 1641, a royal asylum from 1853, an agricultural colony from 1877, a wall the commune began taking down in 1977, and a park since 1996. The wall is gone; the line it stood on is still the edge of the park. That line is the unit I count in: an estate can lose its wall, its programme and its name and remain the same parcel.
In Collegno they say every family had a relative who worked at the asylum. A gardener remembered producing five tonnes of vegetables a day, with the patients helping. I am not standing outside this either: an architect with an employer, applying for a fellowship, proposing to build a career on reading this ground. An audit that leaves out its own auditor is a brochure.
Korea, where I trained, has the same building type under other names and no audit either - nor the laundries and reformatories that held the same people under another justification.
With LINA Members I want to build the audit that does not exist, estate by estate, in the network's own regions: fieldwork, a workshop, a publication written with a philosopher.