Museum Madang
Mihn Hyun-jun and mp_art architects · 2013
Walk past the entrance and the building opens out into a wide paved courtyard with the tiled roofs of Jongchinbu on one side, the glass exhibition wing on another and the peaks of Bukaksan and Inwangsan rising behind. This is the Museum Madang, the heart of the Seoul branch. A madang is the courtyard of a traditional Korean house, an empty space that is used for everything: drying grain, holding ceremonies, playing, gathering. The architects used the same idea for the museum, and the courtyard is where exhibitions spill outdoors, where summer concerts are held and where visitors simply sit.
Look at how the ground changes from stone to gravel to grass, and at the way the surrounding buildings are all roughly the same height, so that the mountains remain the tallest things in view. The courtyard is aligned so that you look north towards the ridge that shelters the old city, the same view the kings had from the palace next door. In the evening the terracotta and glass warm up and the courtyard fills with people from the cafes.
The museum runs an annual Young Architects Program in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the winning pavilion is built in the madang each summer, a temporary structure of shade, water or light that is the most photographed thing in Seoul for a few months. Other courtyards branch off around the site, each with its own character: a sunken court by the library, a quiet court by the historic buildings. Together they turn a museum into something closer to a neighbourhood.
Did You Know? Every summer the winner of the museum's Young Architects Program builds a temporary pavilion in the madang, following the model of the same programme at MoMA in New York.
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