“Before/After” provides an overview of Cho’s work over the past twelve years. Centered on the before and after of doing architecture, it offers a critical reflection on the status of the architectural discipline in Korea and in the global arena. Minsuk Cho studies the fundamentals of architecture and observes the logic of high-density urban life.

While acknowledging that architecture operates within the mechanisms of the market, it proposes productive alternatives that imagine anew our identity and our relations of space. While incorporating existing systems such as the flat slab, Cho’s concepts such as systematic heterogeneity, time-specific architecture, collective intimacy, and domino/dome-ino are intertwined with structural, material, spatial, and programmatic transformations that present the possibility of new ways of living.

Mass Studies works in a period of rapid change. During the past twenty years, Korea’s construction industry has shrunk in proportion to the explosive growth of internet use. In this situation, architecture as a productive medium of sense, knowledge, and capital enters a critical stage of evolution. Irrespective of the architect’s intention, architecture is consumed and reproduced within an infinite space.

Architectural projects remain mostly unrealized and their before and after seem to exist as two parallel universes. In this reality, what is done in the in-between is the crucial thing. Against the notion of architecture as a crystallized set of complete buildings, “Before/After” highlights architecture as a temporal and physical presence, as the multidimensional performances of diverse actors. “Before/After” proposes that architecture is a process for producing not only buildings but also sense and knowledge.