work

Collective housing is a form of dwelling in which many people live in close proximity, yet it is often assembled from functionally separated spaces—each unit's interior, the corridor, the elevator, the parking area.
Even where a dedicated community facility is provided, its distance from the everyday paths of daily life makes it difficult to generate real relationships among residents.

Rather than planning community as a single program, this project began by creating the possibility of encountering neighbors within the ordinary act of leaving home, moving through the complex, and returning—an attempt to design housing with a loose set of relationships, one that lets residents sense one another's presence without intruding on individual life.

In traditional villages there are places that sit between the private and the public without being clearly defined—the alley between houses, the small space in front of a gate, the yard, the raised outdoor platform.
In such spaces, people pass through, pause for a moment, and come to recognize one another's lives naturally, without anyone deliberately organizing a gathering.

Recreating this relationship within contemporary collective housing became a key starting point for the design.
Rather than concentrating community space in a single center, the aim was to disperse shared space across several stages, spanning the different scales of the complex, the building block, and the individual unit.

Several housing blocks were arranged at differing angles around a bent community street.
The triangular spaces created where blocks face each other obliquely become small plazas or courtyards, and community cores—housing shared programs and vertical circulation—were placed within them.

This relationship repeats at a smaller scale within each block.
Small courtyards and semi-outdoor spaces sit between units, while a wide shared space at the base of each block extends naturally from the complex's street.
Shared space thus continues from the street of the complex, through the courtyard of the block, to the small space in front of each unit, changing in scale and character at every step.

Leaving home, residents no longer pass through a single corridor to reach the outside; instead they move through a sequence of shared spaces, large and small.
In that passage, moments of encountering someone, sitting down briefly, or sensing another person's daily life arise naturally.

Jakgyori is closer to a village that lets each household maintain its own life while still allowing relationships to form when needed, rather than housing built to enforce a strong sense of community.
The many points of contact created between building and building, unit and unit, gather into one loosely woven community.