Museum Mimesis
Paju Book City, located thirty kilometers northwest of the South Korean capital Seoul. On an area of 150 hectares (completed in 2003), activities related to publishing (lectures, printing, paper production) are concentrated in one place.
Mimesis Museum, which was created based on a project by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza together with local architect Jun Sung Kim, was opened earlier this year and contains a private collection of modern art from a South Korean publisher of art books.
Facing the street, the museum appears as a rectangular cube. However, the northern part opens up into two wings that organically wrap around the inner atrium. The façades made of exposed concrete are windowless except for the ground floor and fully highlight the sculpturally tuned mass of the museum. Siza, who has never visited the site, describes his design with these words: “Although I wanted to create an atrium, I did not want a completely enclosed courtyard, which resulted in this curved shape. At first, one sees a hard cubic form, but as one walks around it, the expression of the building completely changes.” The shaping of the exhibition spaces determines the access of light into the interior. Siza wanted to work almost exclusively with natural light from above, and therefore a built-in second ceiling had to be designed, creating wide light openings between the walls. When asked how he could design a building for a site he had never seen before, Siza responded: “We made very large models, so I could also enter the museum here in Porto to work with the proportions and light of the inner spaces.”
Mimesis Museum, which was created based on a project by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza together with local architect Jun Sung Kim, was opened earlier this year and contains a private collection of modern art from a South Korean publisher of art books.
Facing the street, the museum appears as a rectangular cube. However, the northern part opens up into two wings that organically wrap around the inner atrium. The façades made of exposed concrete are windowless except for the ground floor and fully highlight the sculpturally tuned mass of the museum. Siza, who has never visited the site, describes his design with these words: “Although I wanted to create an atrium, I did not want a completely enclosed courtyard, which resulted in this curved shape. At first, one sees a hard cubic form, but as one walks around it, the expression of the building completely changes.” The shaping of the exhibition spaces determines the access of light into the interior. Siza wanted to work almost exclusively with natural light from above, and therefore a built-in second ceiling had to be designed, creating wide light openings between the walls. When asked how he could design a building for a site he had never seen before, Siza responded: “We made very large models, so I could also enter the museum here in Porto to work with the proportions and light of the inner spaces.”
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![Museum Mimesis - <wyp><![CDATA[Western and Southern view]]></wyp>](https://cdn.archmedia.eu/cache/images/buildings/gallery/picture_2933_38.jpeg-389x310-museum-mimesis.jpg?algorithm=1&mtime=1642333848)
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