Design Vanguard

SsD

Jinhee Park and John Hong take on an age of austerity with a collection of carefully crafted projects that don't skimp on aesthetics.

By Asad Syrkett

White Block Gallery
SsD
South Korea
Park and Hong clinched the commission to design the steel-frame and frosty-fritted-glass White Block Gallery in an invited competition in 2011. The 16,145-square-foot space, which is dedicated to global contemporary art in a variety of media, comprises a series of flexible exhibition and event spaces. Because its site is a no-fly zone bordering North Korea, the gallery was restricted to a three-story maximum height. So SsD devised a scheme that includes a long building with a stepped section that rises slowly over the terrain like a shallow staircase. SsD was the lone American design firm among the five invited offices. 'We're finding that we can really get innovative work done in Korea,' says Park.
Image courtesy SsD /© Chang Kyun Kim

White Block Gallery
SsD
South Korea
The 16,145-square-foot White Block Gallery sits in the trendy Heyri Arts Valley in South Korea. Because its site borders North Korea and is in a no-fly zone, SsD tackled restrictions to the building's height.
Image courtesy SsD /© Chang Kyun Kim

White Block Gallery
SsD
South Korea
A view inside the White Block Gallery. LED-lit plexi-rods, in the style of SsD's 'Cloud' installation, hang from the ceiling in this entrance hall.
Image courtesy SsD /© Chang Kyun Kim

White Block Gallery
SsD
South Korea
An exhibition space at the White Block Gallery.
Image courtesy SsD /© Chang Kyun Kim

Infinite Box
SsD
South Korea
SsD created this project, a deceptively simple six-and-a-half-foot cube, for South Korea's Gwangju Design Biennale in 2009. While the plaster-and-wood volume takes an unassuming form, visitors step inside to a world of color (provided by luminescent fishing line) that is amplified by mirrors lining each of the box's walls. The challenge, Park and Hong explain, was to deal with an environment limited by its dimensions and expand its boundaries. SsD's design was one of 20 similarly rectilinear pieces created for the exhibition, each with its own riff on the theme of the articulated box.
Image courtesy SsD /© Chang Kyun Kim

Infinite Box
SsD
South Korea
A man steps inside the Infinite Box, a 2009 installation SsD completed for South Korea's Gwangju Design Biennale.
Image courtesy SsD /© Chang Kyun Kim

Songpa Micro-Housing
SsD
Seoul, South Korea
In Seoul, the densely populated capital of South Korea and its largest metropolitan area (at 25 million residents), space is scarce. SsD's microhousing scheme for a community of emerging artists in the city's Songpa district features 120-square-foot apartment units meant to minimize wasted space and maximize the usable floor area. Though the apartments are uniform in square footage, there are rectangular and square varieties with slightly different layouts. The metal screen planned for the building's facade provides security and privacy.
Image courtesy SsD /© Chang Kyun Kim

Cloud
SsD
South Korea
Commissioned for a courtyard at the White Block Gallery, this work takes its name from the shape of the three loosely organized clusters of LED-lit plexi-rods, supported by a steel-and-aluminum frame, in this audio-visual installation. Sensors track visitors' movements through the space, and are used to manipulate the level of illumination and sound as crowds increase in size beneath the cluster of lights. In the absence of a flock of gallerygoers, Cloud's light and sound levels respond to information about the temperature, humidity, and other atmospheric conditions by devices in the aluminum channels.
Image courtesy SsD /© Chang Kyun Kim

Island of Water
SsD
Incheon, South Korea
SsD's Island of Water is a 2010 plan to reestablish Ahamdo Island, a small strip of land in Incheon, South Korea, that in 1930 was accessible only via a footbridge passable at low tide. Today the area around Ahamdo Island has been filled in with infrastructure projects and annexed as part of the mainland. SsD's proposal involves inundating this land again and reintroducing native marshland plants to encourage and support the ecosystem that once flourished in the area. SsD's ambitious design includes a pontoon bridge that would rise and fall with the tide, and plans for an oyster farm. A steel-frame visitors' center planned for the site would allow views out over the newly created marshland, with a minimal footprint on the land.
Image courtesy SsD /© Chang Kyun Kim

Big Dig House
SsD
Cambridge, Massachusetts
SsD's 2006 Big Dig House sourced materials from the Boston infrastructure project of the same name.
Photo courtesy SsD

Big Dig House
SsD
Cambridge, Massachusetts
A view of the house's interior.
Photo courtesy SsD

Braver House
SsD
Newton, Massachusetts
SsD sought to build an alternative to the typical single-family residence with their Braver House, placing PV panels on the canted roof.
Photo courtesy SsD / ' Chang Kyun Kim

Braver House
SsD
Newton, Massachusetts
Inside the Braver House.
Photo courtesy SsD / ' Chang Kyun Kim

Cambridge, MA/New York City/Seoul

Don't let the name fool you'Single Speed Design (SsD)'s architectural approach is more like a 10-speed bicycle than a fixed-gear model, with principals Jinhee Park, 40, and John Hong, 43, shifting their approach with each new project. 'For us, design is a process of negotiation,' says Hong. The twosome took the name of the firm from the kind of transportation they used to zip around Cambridge, Massachusetts, where each earned an M.Arch. from Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD). Though today the firm's principals shuttle between their three offices in Cambridge, New York, and Park's native South Korea via grander modes of transit, bicycles'with their handsome utility and simplicity'seem an apt parallel for SsD's body of work.

Before the couple established SsD in 2003, the American-born Hong worked with two partners in New York at a commercial interiors firm the three had established, while Park completed her M.Arch. Their first major collaboration as SsD was on the Valentine Houses, a trio of townhouses in Cambridge. It was then that Hong decided to leave the firm he'd founded in New York to work with Park. 'The Valentine Houses project had a roof on it,' Hong jokes, explaining the move. SsD has since garnered acclaim for its small- and medium-scale work, from several installations to a newly christened, 16,145-square-foot art center'the elegant, ghostly White Block Gallery'in South Korea's trendy Heyri Art Valley. Through serendipitous circumstances, Park and Hong have clinched a series of commissions from developers who've heard about their work. The White Block's owner, for example, invited SsD to submit a scheme for the gallery after seeing the firm's work in 2009, when Park won the AIA's Young Architects Award.

The user experience is paramount to SsD, most evident in its psychedelic Infinite Box and the audiovisual installation Cloud. Infinite Box, which the duo crafted for South Korea's Gwangju Design Biennale in 2009, is a six-and-a-half-foot cube, though its mirrored interior walls give visitors who step inside it the illusion of a much larger space. Cloud is similarly interactive, toying with visitors' sensory perception by tracking movement beneath the LED-lit canopy to modify light and sound levels. 'A small space is only small in dimension,' says Park.

A stripped-down aesthetic is a common thread in SsD's work. For its 2006 Big Dig House, a private residence for a contractor associated with the Boston infrastructure project, the firm recycled some of the industrial refuse generated by the Big Dig. 'All of our projects are guided by structural-engineering principles,' says Park, explaining that the firm takes a cross-disciplinary tack that's crucial in the steadily changing'and broadening'profession. At the beginning of their careers, 'there were a series of projects that we were lucky to have but were doing just because we could,' says Hong. 'Now we're designing with more conceptual clarity,' adds Park.

As their practice gains speed, Park and Hong aim to continue to blur the boundaries between architecture, engineering, and fine art, and hope to expand their international practice. A microhousing project in South Korea, consisting of 120-square-foot apartments, is one of several SsD projects planned there. This and others in the works aren't necessarily glamorous, Park and Hong say, but answer a real and growing need in South Korea and other densely populated regions of the world. Because they address concepts, rather than aesthetic moves, 'a lot of our projects aren't single-picture, magazine-friendly,' says Hong. 'It's about the space and experience. You have to be there.'

SsD

Photo courtesy SsD

Jinhee Park, John Hong

FOUNDED: 2003

DESIGN STAFF: 6

PRINCIPALS: Jinhee Park, John Hong

EDUCATION: Park: Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), M.Arch., 2002; Seoul National University, B.F.A., 1995. Hong: Harvard GSD, M.Arch., 1996; University of Virginia, B.A., 1993.

KEY COMPLETED PROJECTS: Cloud, Heyri, South Korea, 2012; White Block Gallery, Heyri, 2011; Clover Restaurant Holyoke, Cambridge, Mass., 2011; Braver House, Newton, Mass., 2011; Big Dig House, Lexington, Mass., 2006

KEY CURRENT PROJECTS: Songpa Micro-Housing, Seoul, 2013; Novartis Cambridge Campus, Cambridge, Mass., 2015

WEB SITE: www.ssdarchitecture.com