COMPLETED
2017
LOCATION
Incheon, South Korea
CONCEPT
Urban park becomes museum
PROGRAM
Exhibition, education and research
14,150 sf

An inscribed, double-height surface wraps around the circulation spine to form an interior public street. This surface is perforated by characters from the seminal Korean text Hunminjungeum (roughly translated as” letters and sounds made for the people”), which all Korean school children learn in order to understand the origins of their unique language. The perforation extends out to the landscape to recreate characters from the iconic Rosetta Stone, changing its relief as it is applied to different surfaces: green pavers, incised concrete tile, discrete linear pools, and grass. The resulting landscape comprises an explicit reference to the first artifact in the history of writing to include translations of the same text in different ancient languages.