In Seoul, the Shinseon Play pavilion is a walk in the clouds. Visitors meander along an elevated walkway among 60 cloud-shaped balloons, stopping for a game of baduk or a jump on a trampoline along the way. Cool mist machines provide both an ethereal cast to the area and very real relief from the summer heat. Eventually, the pavilion ascends to a grass-covered plaza with a view back to the picturesque Inwang Mountain in the distance. During a recent visit the lawn was covered with dragonflies, which seemed as if they had been placed there to accentuate the dreamy quality of the experience.
The pavilion, which is open through October 5, is the winning competition design for the Young Architects Program (YAP) in Seoul. The city is the newest locale for the program, which New York’s Museum of Modern Art and its sister institution MoMA PS1 founded in 1998 and have since brought to Santiago, Istanbul, and Rome. The Seoul design is the work of Moon Ji Bang—architects Cheonkang Park, Kyungmin Kwon, and Jangwon Choi—who met working with Minsuk Cho at Mass Studies and who each now runs his own firm.
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