Lithic Knot - Jeongok Prehistoric Museum

View of the Jeongok Prehistoric Museum from the park.

Project Details

• Project Name: Lithic Knot - Jeongok Prehistoric Museum
• Client: Gyunggi Province
• Project Type: Architectural design
• Principal Designer: Homin Kim, Hwanki Lim, Chris S. Yoo
• Design Team: Jihyun Park, Harry Paticas + Keumsung Architects
• Year of commencement of project: Mar. 2006
• Location of site: Jeongok, South Korea
• Site Area: 63,585 square meters
• Built-up Area: 5,180 square meters

A bird's eye view of the museum.

The Building

Jeongokri is one of the most important Paleolithic sites in the world.

Lithic Knot is envisaged as a museum structure that is embedded into both the geology and landscape of the site.

The design of the museum focuses on the creation of a building fabric that articulates exhibition spaces while connecting scattered outdoor programs across the entire site.

The organization of the museum attempts to dissolve traditional boundaries by creating multiple points of connection around each outdoor program.

The museum thus emerges as a place for the interchange of people, experience and information.

The twisted 'figure-of-eight' structure of the museum is intended to evoke the crude 'post and lintel' architecture of the stone age albeit with modern systems of construction and materials.

View of the main exhibition space.

The Lithic Knot museum is organized around a Precipice Court to which all parts of the museum are directly connected.

Aside from being a rich visual spectacle the court allows visitors to experience a physical representation of the chronology of the Paleolithic era.

This large external space, enclosed on one side by the basalt precipice performs as the main public space for the entire museum site.

In the solid volumes of exhibition spaces, the visitors experience the chronology of the Paleolithic era in a linear fashion, whereas in the Precipice Court the entire geological history of the Jeongokri prehistoric site is experienced simultaneously by reading the layered seams of time in the stratified rock.

As visitors move through the sequence of museum exhibitions, the basalt precipice functions as a time datum orienting the visitors.

The use of carefully applied manifestations to the windows looking onto the court allows visitors to see the respective time lines projected onto the stratified face of the precipice.

In this way time presides over the whole museum.

View of the Precipice Court.

On the ground level, the main public foyer and circulation spaces are situated around this court creating a dynamic and animated space.

A series of 'inside-outside' transitional spaces are created between the foyer and court.

The vertical circulation has also been designed to engage with it, with a long escalator gradually rising up on the north side and a sequence of stair landings acting as viewing platforms on the south-east side.

Above the main foyer and circulation space is a void that doubles as both a light well and elevated viewing platform both towards the basalt precipice and the river Hantan.

The design formally and spatially derives from the experience it carves out for the visitor.

The starting point for the design was the notion of a linear sequence, akin to the linearity of time.

By creating a chronologically-organized exhibition of sequential spaces, the experience and flow of visitors can be smoothly controlled.

This format of visitor experience lends itself to the exhibition of the Jeongokri site remains and the natural history of human evolution display.

View of the Cafe and viewing deck in the upper volume.

By folding the sequence of linear time however, the present could be seen to have an interactive coexistence with history.

Past and present are materialized into two volumes -- the lower volume being used for the exhibition space while the one above providing for a viewing platform and cafeteria.

At the point where the past and present volumes intersect, a vertical connection is made thus creating a potential loop in time. At this meeting point the main exhibition hall displaying over 300 Paleolithic remains is located, creating a continuous internal circulation loop, connected to a series of external circulation loops that encourages a dynamic visitor experience.

The open-ended volumes representing the past and present are integrated into the topography of the site.

At each of these points the circulation route bifurcates thus allowing visitors the option of continuing into the next exhibition space or of connecting to a circuit loop to one of the external site programs.

Credits

• Text: Courtesy of the architect
• Computer rendered images: Courtesy of the architect
• Compiled and edited by Varun Ajani