Architects:DRAWING WORKS

Area:10m²

Year:2025

Photographs:Joon Hwan, Yoon

Lead Architects:Youngbae Kim

Category:Cultural Architecture,Pavilion

City:Jeju

Country:South Korea

Text description provided by the architects. The light of Jeju is remarkably unique—piercing, mutable, and ever-shifting between winds, clouds, rain, and mist. The Light Museum is an attempt to capture this ephemeral nature of Jeju's light through architecture. It is not a reproduction of nature's forms, but an experimental structure that allows the sensations of nature to permeate through space.

The Museum appears as a solid, blackened mass of timber facing outward, its closed form paradoxically inviting entry rather than repelling it. The external tension between the Museum's mass and the surrounding landscape contrasts with an interior that unfolds in an open, sensorial manner. Constructed by stacking cedar blocks measuring 240mm x 150mm at regular intervals, the structure transforms materiality into experience. Each wooden block acts both as a structural unit and a medium for capturing light.

The 12mm gaps between the blocks go beyond simple constructional joints; they serve as delicate filters that allow Jeju's light and wind to infiltrate the space. Rather than defining or articulating form, the light merely exists—leaving a subtle material impression within the space. The rough grain of the cedar, the charred surfaces, and the light seeping through the gaps collectively condense the experience of Jeju's air, humidity, scent, and the passage of time. Visitors do not perceive a direct representation of nature within the Museum. Instead, they experience the tremor of light and the breath of timber, sensing how nature permeates inward and how the space responds with a dense materiality.

This approach rejects fixed meanings or functions, inviting users to complete the space through their own perceptions. The Museum is not defined by its program or form but by the slow accumulation of changing light, flowing air, tactile surfaces, and ambient scents—creating what can be called a living architecture.

The Light Museum is not a structure that exists merely to be seen. Rather, it quietly embodies the tremors of Jeju's nature within a physical medium. Here, nature is not observed—it is felt. And the traces of that sensation linger long after leaving the space, deeply inscribed within memory and body.

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