Shilla Millennium Archive | Gyeongju, South Korea | 2022

Architects: Tectonics Lab
General Contractor: C1S
Client: Gyeongju National Museum
Photographers: Texture on Texture

The West Annex Hall is an old storage building that exemplifies the traditionality of the Korean architecture sphere of the 1970s in its representation of the wooden structure of a Shilla hanok in reinforced concrete. The hall had been constructed by implementing the appearance of the tectonic form of the traditional wooden structure through the construction technology of stereotomics.

A purely stereotomic concrete structure remains in the interior of this building after the removal of a partition wall and a ceiling for remodeling. Taking over the incomplete work based on the stereotomic implementation of tectonic traditionality in the 1970s when South Korea had been a poor country, the architects aim to realize a wooden tectonic structure that will be extended from the stereotomic concrete structure to the interior space.
This work is a transition to a novel historicity extending the concept of traditionality beyond mimesis of past heritage into the emotional effects (affect) of the material and joint. Mirrors reflect the entity of reality, create a virtual illusion, and expand the world of senses beyond the limits of physical space.

In the Shilla Millennium Archive, the mirror installed in the pediment reflects the shape of the asymmetric space, creating the illusion of symmetrical order and extending the space of knowledge beyond physical boundaries. The mirror is a spatial metaphor for a thousand-year-old historical document archive, as well as an architectural fantasy about the endlessly extending bookscape.