DISSOLVING ARCH
stpmj
YEAR
2017
LOCATION
Jeju-do, South Korea
TYPE
Commercial › Pop-Up Cultural › Pavilion Sculpture
The project, ‘Dissolving Arch’ is a weather-specific installation located in Jeju Island.
The island has a long rainy and humid period in summer.
The structure is designed to react on rain and humid, exploring constituent of masonry and reflecting time of weather changes.
The arch is constructed by stacking rock salt units (200mm x 100mm x 50mm) with cement mortar, and the salt bricks get eroded by water exposure, leaving a mortar skeleton in the end.
The project starts with the curiosity about constituent of brick and its structure.
Instead of clay bricks, the arch is piled up with salt bricks and cement mortar.
With two distinctive materiality of the salt brick, light permeable and melt-able, it transmits light inside of the arch and get melt gradually by frequent rain of Jeju Island.
More get dissolved and better chance to communicate with nature/background & light allowance.
The structural cement mortar is left as another installation, a porous skeleton after the bricks dissolve.
It is about a narrative that an isolated and solid object transforms to an open and framed structure creating another dialogue of people and nature.
Unlike ordinary clay bricks absorb the moisture of the mortar and quickly have friction on the surface, the salt bricks do not.
The arch is completed after creating scores on the salt brick surface to increase frictional force, and reinforcing with the steel wires in mortar.
During the three month exhibition period, rain and humid weather in Jeju will slowly dissolve the structure into nature.
