House 1, 2 and 3

Abstract

This thesis reclaims the "small house," typically excluded from debates on publicness, as an architectural device for rethinking how domestic space can participate in collective urban life. Against the hermetic tendency of housing in Seoul, it proposes an ordinary house combined with small commercial programs as a counter-project that operates not through large-scale planning, but through the precise arrangement of thresholds and everyday architectural elements. This is the third in a sequence of three small house projects: the first in Tokyo, the second in New York, and this in Seoul. Together they form an ongoing investigation into how domestic life may be opened outward through small-scale design strategies, across questions of backyard publicness, living and working relations, and the urban capacity of ordinary buildings. Drawing on an expanded reading of Genpei Akasegawa's "Hyperart Thomasson," a practice of identifying urban remnants that have lost their function yet persist in the city, the project reframes this mode of observation as an architectural method. Where Thomasson locates elements rendered useless, this thesis reads the minor additions of Seoul's domestic fabric (stairs, gates, canopies, appendages, garden patches) as latent devices: peripheral not because they have lost function, but because their potential has gone unrecognized. Through archaeological drawing, this potential is uncovered; through design, these elements are rearranged as small-scale instruments that articulate interior life while constructing a transferable urban logic between house and city, advancing smallness as a method for reopening the boundary between domestic interiority and the public realm.