It started with a stool. Made of wood and steel for an old brewery converted into a cultural venue in Mungyeong, South Korea, it was the first thing Heechan Park designed after establishing Studio Heech in Seoul in 2018. Park let the renovated 1944 structure inform the seat’s materiality and its simple construction, “so the furniture is a record of the building itself,” says the architect. Working at different scales and across disciplines continues to be essential to Park’s practice as his five-person studio designs industrial products, exhibition, temporary pavilions, interactive installations, and buildings. That stool, though, imprinted the importance of making things in the firm’s identity. “We believe that architecture is a process of making before it becomes a completed form.” The process itself is essential to the work, says Park.

Before launching his own firm, Park, 48, first worked in Seoul for M.A.R.U. and then in London for Michael Hopkins, whose projects usually express the way they were built and reveal the character of the materials used. During his six years at Hopkins Architects, he learned to “look at the local context, local materials, and traditional construction techniques,” says Park, and then “bring those ideas to today’s environment.”

One of Park’s most fascinating projects, the Bangjja Yugi Museum in Mungyeong, inserts a pair of rammed-earth structures and a circular steel stair inside a mundane warehouse that had been dressed up previously with faux timber elements to mimic a traditional Korean house. The museum, which celebrates the work of Bong-ju Lee, a master of hand-forged bronze ware, initiates a dialogue between old and new, fake and “authentic.” Instead of erasing the questionable moves of an earlier designer, Park recognized the emotional attachment that Lee’s family felt to the existing building, while establishing a new material palette and an intriguing spatial experience.

The element of time informs much of Park’s work–from specific projects like the Bangjja Yugi Museum and the Sanyang Brewery, which reuse old buildings, to his general approach to ground-up construction. “I’m interested in how architecture unfolds as a sequence of experiences—how it is perceived, inhabited, and transformed over time.” Instead of creating buildings defined by fixed images, he tries to craft ones that engage movement, use, and change. “Architecture is not a static object with a singular meaning,” states Park, “but an open and evolving framework that continuously redefines itself through occupation, environment, and temporal shifts.” Buildings that adapt and remain meaningful over time, says Park, take sustainability beyond simple notions of performance and technology.

Park and his small team are currently designing a Pilgrim’s House for Catholic priests on Jeju Island, so it is not surprising that ritual animates much of his work in forming the spatial choreography of the Bangjja Yugi Museum, for example, and the movement of people and objects in his Urban Pinball Machine, an outdoor installation in a park in Seoul. Like the stool that kicked off his practice, most of the projects that came afterward articulate the way they are made and express a sense of integrity that feels rooted to their particular time and place.