Hou de Sousa proposes “Cuneiformed” National Museum of World Writing in Incheon

Project excerpt: “The National Museum of World Writing in Songdo pairs two conditions at odds with one another. The first is the purpose of the Museum: exploring the ancient universality of human communication in written form. The second is its site: the city of Songdo, built in the past decade on a tabula rasa of reclaimed land. 

Our proposal for the Museum addresses these opposites, creating a container for the study and exposition of writing as an ancient manifestation of culture in a city whose culture is so new as to be undefined. In the process, we are writing this new city’s culture through architecture.”

“Our strategy addresses these conditions by proposing a form evocative of the very thing Songdo lacks: a history. But rather than employ stereotypical historic architectural forms, we looked for the places where the fundamentals of writing and architecture overlap - solid to void relationships, the trace of gesture on surface, the meaning in the depth of a mark, penetration, or extrusion. And we expressed these on the tabula rasa of the site, cutting into the surface with abstractions of these formal elements. The result is a museum one discovers as if by accident, revealed in the earth as an archaeological site, its repeated modular geometries evocative of the ancient Cuneiform writing system of marks cut into a flat clay surface.”

“Rather than a singular building, the museum reads as a below-grade, unearthed village. Two levels down, visitors circulate on open-air plazas that connect the program components. The components are contained in a ring of circulation and support systems that is entirely below grade. The village components themselves are composed of 7mx7mx5m modules, each of which has a carved void element. These carved elements are inspired by typographic maneuvers shared by all writing systems. 

The result is a ‘roof’ that is actually a ground plane of unexpected openings and penetrations that encourage investigation and discovery. Additionally, the voids of each module serve as light wells, clerestories, and small courtyards while simultaneously providing a means of partitioning spaces.”

You can read the rest of Hou de Sousa's proposal on their website. More project images below.