'Sayou: Living and Thinking in Architecture,' is a highly specific alter-ego to the highly generic housing found in most apartments in Korea. While mass-produced housing is dictated by a pseudo code derived from market desires, the design of this complex attempts to undo standardized preconceptions through recontextualizing the very elements of the dwelling into new experiences.

Consisting of an owner's wing who happens to be an urban planer and a flexible guest house wing for tourists, the typical courtyard type is transformed by an overlaid rotated geometry: The result is the creation of front and back courtyards instead of a just a central void, fragmented open spaces that generate ambiguities between interior and exterior, and multiple conditions of frontality. Not only do visitors vacation from their current urban lives, they also take a break from the reified system of standardized rooms they have been living in.

That is not to say the project lacks a relationship back to typologies. In a collaborative intersection between the disciplines of planing and architecture, the abstraction of the traditional hanok type is used as a starting point to inject haptic and multivalent use while still maintaining a strong figure of the typology's origin. As the site context is nothing special, the layered walls of the project intensify the internal spatial games set out by the architect allowing the building to function as both a highly aesthetic experience and as a critique of the current state of the housing.

The project becomes a layered critique of standard residential rooms one would find in an apartment. Reading as either carved out mass or as rotated planes, the building flickers  between the polarities of solid and void, planar and volumetric. The seemingly simple rotation of the surrounding garden wall creates new subdivisions between the central courtyard space and the resulting residual triangular courts along the perimeter of the project.

The extreme polarity between standardized residential spaces of apartments and the specialized spaces within the Jeju House is represented in the way the project's everyday rooms offer extreme and heightened experiences. The main courtyard space references the geometry of Korean traditional housing (Hanok) through the introduction of overhanging eaves. It becomes a social space for special events but also supports the individual activities of daily life through its adjacencies to areas of rest, eating, and bathing.

The rotations in the geometry create angled walls that deny a strict sense of frontality creating unpredictable intersections between inside and outside. Even as the programs occupy a linear volume, the angles also subdivide the spaces into overlapping zones. For instance in the bedroom, flanking outdoor courtyards formed by the angled walls expand and rescale the space while maintaining privacy.