The primary time I noticed pictures of Concrete Utopia, I assumed it was a render. The form of factor that circulates on design Instagram earlier than quietly disappearing into the “ideas that by no means received constructed” pile. Chunky gray pipes organized in an open courtyard, folks shifting by way of and round them prefer it was at all times presupposed to be this fashion. However the challenge is actual, it lives outdoors the Museum of Modern Artwork Busan in South Korea, and the extra I sat with the photographs, the extra I discovered myself learning them the best way you examine one thing that appears easy till it isn’t.
Concrete Utopia is the work of South Korean designer Hyunje Joo. The fabric is easy: discarded concrete pipes, the type utilized in building infrastructure and usually hauled away as soon as a construct wraps up. What Joo does with them is the attention-grabbing half. Quite than disguising or dramatically remodeling them, he arranges the pipes right into a configuration that preserves precisely what they’re whereas utterly altering what they do. The cylinders are grouped and stacked at various orientations, making a composition that reads much less like a salvage pile and extra like a spatial argument. You’ll be able to inform it was designed. You simply can’t instantly inform how.
Designer: Hyunje Joo
The round geometry is doing a variety of work right here. Repetition is a traditional design instrument, but it surely tends to flatten issues when overused. Joo avoids that by letting the pipes fluctuate in how they cluster and orient with out introducing something new to the fabric vocabulary. The result’s a rhythm that feels thought-about with out feeling managed. There’s a looseness to the association that invitations you in slightly than holding you at a visible distance, which is more durable to drag off than it appears to be like.
What the design will get genuinely proper is the query of scale. These are giant industrial pipes, and inserting them in a public setting with none softening or mediation might simply learn as aggressive or alienating. As a substitute, the proportions find yourself working within the challenge’s favor. The openings within the pipes are broad sufficient to cross by way of, to take a seat inside, to lean towards. The construction accommodates a physique with out being designed round one particular use. A baby runs by way of it in another way than an grownup pauses inside it, and the design makes room for each with out attempting to orchestrate both. That form of spatial generosity is one thing a variety of extra thought-about, costlier design initiatives fail to realize.
The floor high quality issues too. Concrete has a specific visible weight that doesn’t disappear no matter context. It doesn’t soften beneath museum lighting or turn into ornamental simply because it’s been repositioned. Joo leans into that slightly than working towards it. The rawness of the fabric is a part of the design language, not an impediment to it. Up shut, the feel of the pipes carries the proof of their earlier life, which provides the challenge a cloth honesty that polished surfaces merely can’t replicate.
The structure itself avoids fastened hierarchy, that means there’s no apparent entrance or again, no major axis that tells you the place to face or which route to face. That’s a deliberate compositional selection, and it modifications how the house feels to maneuver by way of. Most public constructions, even good ones, have a logic that steers you. Concrete Utopia doesn’t. You arrive at your individual studying of it, and that openness is constructed into the association slightly than by the way touchdown there.
Positioned throughout the grounds of a up to date artwork museum, the challenge sits in an attention-grabbing place between sculpture and structure. It features like a constructing however doesn’t resolve like one. It reads like an set up however behaves like infrastructure. That in-between high quality is the place the design lives, and it’s what makes Concrete Utopia extra compelling than an easy sustainability gesture or a purely formal train would have been. Joo discovered an area the place the design query and the fabric reply are the identical factor. That’s not a given. Most design retains these two issues at a distance from one another for the entire challenge.
