Designing for the Blind: WISE Architecture’s Dialogue in the Dark Bukchon

Architecture is an inherently visual design medium, yet the form and layout of our built environment is immeasurably more significant to those of us who cannot see. Earlier this year, we looked at the design of spaces that zone in on specific senses, such as the extraordinary, pitch-black void of James Turrell and Tadao Ando’s “Backside of the Moon,” an installation that imposes blindness on those who enter. The sensory experience within Turrell’s installation is temporary, but what if you were deprived of your sight permanently? Would you view architectural design in an entirely different way?

The social enterprise “Dialog in the Dark” allows visitors to experience the world as a blind person, being guided through everyday tasks that become complex challenges for those used to relying on their vision. Since its inception in 1986, the organization has held events in more than 150 cities in over 30 countries, including Seoul, South Korea — and now it is making its return in a purpose-designed exhibition building entitled Dialogue in the Dark Bukchon.

“In the process of the design, we had one question in conjunction with the context of Bukchon in Seoul,” reflects Sook Hee Chun, founding partner of WISE Architecture, the firm behind this unusual project. “How can we maintain the value of the traditional Korean village in a form of contemporary architecture?”

The architects’ answer to this question was to design a contemporary gallery building with dashes of modernist chic but conceal it behind a permeable skin that evokes the historic language of Korean village architecture. This skin of louvered screens, called “Bal,” is undoubtedly the defining feature of the building exterior and made for the biggest technical challenge for WISE.

“This thin woven screen is flimsy so it is mostly used in the interior space in [a] Korean traditional house,” explains Chun, “It was not easy to install on a large scale, especially on the exterior. After several mock-up tests, we made it light and durable using metal fabrication, not losing the original sense of ‘Bal’ in bamboo craft.”

The tricky task of marrying traditional and contemporary styles was paired with an equally challenging natural context: the building is located on a cliffside site with fairly dramatic topography, including a 52-foot drop in level from the back to the front of the plot. Given these geographic conditions, WISE elected to embed the building with the slope, meaning that the majority of spaces are single-aspect, with controlled admission of natural light where needed.

‘Light’ spaces include offices and workshops, the reception area, and café, while solid walls encase ‘experience spaces’ on the first and second floors, to the effect that the galleries are completely dark. The design of these spaces demanded that the studio gained knowledge about how the senses of visually impaired people are heightened to compensate for their lack of sight. “At the beginning of the process, we wondered how the visually impaired people recognize space,” Sook explains. “We found out that they memorize space by touching over and over again and reconstruct it in their memory.”

This alternative spatial recognition directly influenced the material palette and specifications throughout the building. WISE sought to produce a rich sensory experience in the darkness. “Various materials were intentionally used inside of the building as well as the exhibition space: from concrete, metal, stone, glass, wood, and even grass, trees, and water.” There was also an increased attention to detail to any architectural element that visitors directly interact with. “We designed different shapes of handles at each door to enable the visually impaired to recognize which way to swing and where they go.”

Externally, a sweeping staircase wraps around the side of the building’s Ando-esque exposed concrete walls, cast in situ with expressed tie holes and incredibly smooth finish. Sheltered between the building and the rocks of the adjacent landscape, a “vertical garden” is incorporated in the form of a dry valley that transforms into a stream during the rainy season. Natural touches are continued all the way up the building, as Chun explains: “The curvy exterior stair floats over the garden and takes visitors into the traditional Hanok roofscape and tiny mountain behind the building.”

Dialog in the Dark’s architecture and surrounding landscape works as a slow reveal feeding upon people’s natural curiosities to explore and experience space in new and unexpected ways. It also forms an intriguing approach to architecture for the partially sighted, proving that visual qualities are but one part of a complex whole when it comes to sensory design. For a space defined by darkness, Seoul’s latest exhibition space is remarkably enlightening. As Chun puts it, “While the sense of sight is taken away within the darkness, the other senses are fully open.”

All photos by Yongkwan Kim. Construction footage by WISE