National Museum of World Writing | Incheon, Republic of Korea | 2017

Architects: SAMOO Architects & Engineers 
Client: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism
Photographers: SAMOO Architects & Engineers

English historian E.H.Carr quotes: “history is an unending dialogue between the present and the past.”

Such unending dialogue was possible because writing — a medium that transcends time and space - have existed within people’s everyday life.

Written writing on pages — a medium that connects people over space & time - has permanence and continuity, passed down through generations keeping history, maintaining a culture, and dissemination of knowledge.

This project for National Museum of World Writing (NMWW) intended to create an architectural “pages,” filled with everything about world writing.

It is a mediation space which links people to people, people to the museum, and museum to the site, just as how writing & page have bridged together the past, present, and future.

For the given site, in between the central park and the city, the museum has to be thought of in terms of horizontality, openness, flexibility and public engagement rather than solid, monolithic and vertical mass.

While respecting the existing context, of both urban and natural, the design proposal a naturally curved & labyrinthine “pages” aims to arrange a lot of contacts, communication, and understanding one another.

“Pages” should establish the conditions of fruitful narratives.

The museum is a place for understanding and respecting the fundamentals of humanity’s culture with writings, and becomes pages, which daily landscape & life written.