Seoul, South Korea
2018

Writing is the organizing force of civilization. The world’s first writers stamped and scratched simple marks into malleable surfaces. Scripts have evolved over millennia as we retrace their forms onto new materials. The National Museum of World Writing engages this history by writing a glyph, an elemental character, into the landscape of Songdo Central Park. Its form is a trefoil, a continuous mark representing the overlap of 3 programs: public, curatorial, and archival. This sinuous concrete foundation structures all museum functions – rising, falling and breaking apart according to program. Old materials and new media interweave throughout the museum to reflect the history of writing in the structure itself.