Entering the liminal with Je Ahn
I caught up with Je Ahn, founder of architecture practice Studio Weave, who confirmed my suspicion that we are all looking for connections to each other and to our material world. We met at E5 bakery in East London and I immediately exposed myself as an amateur interviewer because I had chosen a table right next to the enormous (and very loud) flour mill. Je was very accommodating and suggested we head over to his office round the corner which turned out to be a blessing because, aside from the reduced noise levels, the space gave a real flavour for how he works.
At Mitre & Mondays we are always discussing how to join materials together, what two things are you joining together in your practice?
Je: It's a really hard question, because as an architect, all we do is join things together. Whether it’s the metaphorical to the literal; scientific to the philosophical. But if I were to pinpoint it for us I guess we’re sort of connecting the ideal with reality. We shouldn’t be without hopes or dreams; so I believe that our built environments and the things we produce physically need to have that optimism. Sometimes that’s quite hard to achieve. What’s the ideal, and what’s the reality? And what can we do?
Can you tell us something you've noticed recently that has surprised or delighted you or changed your perspective?
Je: I’m noticing more and more that people are looking for genuine quality of life. I’m noticing this in their behaviour, their aspirations. It’s not surprising, right? Passing through the pandemic we’ve all experienced disruptions in our lives and I feel like people are asking, what am I doing? It’s changing what we expect from design, people are not settling for second or third rate, they want something they are happy with.
This is totally anecdotal, but when I was growing up I was always told you need to separate your work life and your life life. You have a professional face and then you have a personal face. But that balance is changing. People are beginning to feel that they don’t necessarily need such a separation from work and life. Afterall, we spend so much of our lives working, what they really want is to redefine what the work is.
Joe: I can’t tell you how noticeable it was when I moved down to London from the North. Back home you’d go to see your friend and ask them how they were doing and it would be, ‘yeah I went on a great camping trip last week’, whereas in London the response was invariably about work. The hustle. It felt all of a sudden like there was no separation between what you do for a living and who you are as a person.
Je: That is an interesting thing. It's like the joining we spoke about previously. People are looking for a better quality of life while at the same time they’re losing the boundary between work and their life. I certainly can’t separate my work life from my personal life because then I would lose two thirds of my life! It’s not about a better work life balance but more that we should look to better integrate work into our lives.
Made of Sand, completed by Studio Weave in 2019.
Can you tell us about a space that is particularly significant to you?
Je: This is going to sound really corny. I never really had much love for Corbusier when I was at University. I understood he was one of the big three modernist architects but I never really felt it in a direct way. Then, 15 years ago, I visited Ronchamp, a chapel he designed in France, and I cried. I had never until this moment cried about architecture. It wasn’t just the building, it was the whole approach. I awoke at 5am, before the sunset, and walked the footpath in the fog up the hill. There were nuns singing and making very gentle sounds in the church and then the sun came up. The feeling was indescribable. I spent the whole day there taking in not just the building but the whole complex, the village, the hills and nature, seeing how the church was composed, the internal spaces and the human activity.
Joe: I would love to visit.
Je: I think somehow I just timed it perfectly. It’s a spatial experience that I cherish.
How about an object?
Je: I love handmade stuff. My place is full of glassware, pottery and, now, some furniture that people have made.
Joe: When you say handmade, do you mean one offs?
Je: Yeah, things that are individually made and not mass produced. Whenever I travel I tend to go to workshops to meet artists and, if I like it, try to acquire something that they have made. I like the individuality that each object embodies. It’s so human for me. Whenever I see something, it reminds me of that person. It is a way of connecting isn’t it? To the world, through objects.
Community plays an important role in a lot of your design work. How do you make sure that you uphold the integrity of a project, designing for communities, when you've got stakeholders to contend with?
Je: Working as an architect, you have to think about community even when you’re not designing for community directly because you are bringing something into the world where only a select few will use it internally compared to the millions of people in the city that will pass by. So for me the building has to work inside out but at the same time outside in.
We make sure to have dialogue across all stakeholders to ensure we are balancing all the requirements of everyone's needs. It is essential to create trust between all parties, if this can happen then we avoid having one side overriding the other, no singular voice. Buildings, touch wood, tend to last a long time and they are very energy intensive, it should not be done lightly.
Lea Bridge Library, completed by Studio Weave in 2021. Photography Credit - Jim Stephenson.
This is actually a question that Cat wanted to ask you because her mum is Korean. Cat wanted to know if you'd spent much time in South Korea?
Je: So, I came to the UK in 1997, I was thirteen. But I was still very much tethered to Korea, not all my family came over and so I was still going back and forth regularly. My formative years were influenced by Korean ideology and society.
Joe: Do you think that there's a difference between how architecture, objects and spaces are thought of in the UK versus in South Korea?
Je: Interestingly, I recently gave a talk at the Whitechapel Gallery and as part of it I decided to look back at some of my own design work to see whether ‘Koreanness’ exists. One of the main things I picked out was the idea of liminal spaces, the in between spaces where you aren’t inside or outside, there is no defined use. Is it even a room? You are not quite sure what it does! They are a kind of congregation point. In Korea these parts of a building are typically described as a ‘Maru’. I use this idea alot in my design proposals, they are enormously useful.
Studio Weave is an award-winning RIBA Chartered Architecture Practice based in London. We balance a joyful, open-minded approach with technical precision. Studio Weave’s design is characterised by thoughtful responses to client's needs, creating a diverse body of work in the UK and internationally in public, private and commercial sectors.
They value idiosyncrasies, from the characteristics that make somewhere unique, to the particular skills of a master craftsperson. They aim to harness the strengths of a project and its team to create something distinctive and of exceptional quality.
Website: www.studioweave.com Instagram: @studioweave