Nam June Paik Museum, South Korea
Competition Entry
The Nam June Paik Museum will embody the wild contrasts that are found in his artwork. The dichotomies of traditional culture and cutting edge electronic media that make Paik’s artwork seem both religious artifact and esoteric science experiment represent the ying-yang relationship that is central to the Korean society.
We used the Buddhist temple arrangement found in Korea as an organizing concept for our museum layout, overlaid with visual cues and the functional logic of the circuit board. The site offers a deep valley surrounded by forested hills that our museum would occupy. The museum is envisioned as a group of buildings centered on the open plaza, with the main gallery space as the logical focal point.
The relationship of the various buildings would read both as a reference to temple construction and the plug-in logic of circuitry. The plaza will be covered with multicolored playground furnishings and grass to suggest the green resin sheets and candy-colored transistors of circuit boards. The pagoda would be reinterpreted as a cell phone antenna with video screens on its exoskeleton, so that visitors’ cell phone snapshots can be instantly displayed.
