Sewon Roy Kim | Teaching

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Design Teaching. BSU CAP. YSoA. AA SCHOOL. Student Works.

ARCH 201 is the first architecture studio for Ball State CAP students. To make this introduction engaging yet critical, the curriculum was designed as an immersive board game. Each week, students rolled the dice, which guided them through various precedents and real-world challenges in the discipline. This game-like approach encouraged creative problem-solving and adaptive thinking, culminating in the design of a small-scale, flexible domestic space intended for community use.

ARCH 201 F23

2023

Memes have become a vernacular of the digital age—fluid, participatory, and widely distributed. These fragments of visual culture, often in the form of images or short-form videos, compress complex sentiments into shareable formats. They not only reflect but also construct cultural moods, ideologies, and generational humor. In this studio, we will treat memes not as disposable entertainment, but as potent social artifacts that encode spatial, temporal, and political dynamics.

Echoing the pedagogical lens of Venturi, Scott Brown, and their students in Learning from Las Vegas, this course asks: what can we learn from memes as a form of contemporary signage? Can memes, like architecture, be read as spatial texts—sites where cultural meaning is produced, layered, and contested?

We begin with a series of analytical exercises that deconstruct the anatomy of memes. Students will examine their visual rhetoric, cultural context, temporal rhythms, and spatial implications. “Meme Analysis” will be introduced as a tool to dissect the structure and subtext of short-form media, revealing how internet culture indexes collective anxieties, aspirations, and critiques.

From analysis, we move toward projection. Students will translate the compressed semiotics of memes into speculative spatial expressions. Through digital and analog techniques—modeling, mapping, scripting, and layering—students will develop spatial constructs that respond to the logics of virality, irony, and saturation. These projects will not illustrate memes literally, but rather extract their cultural vectors and re-materialize them through architectural form, atmosphere, and sequence.

The studio culminates in the design of a “Meme Museum”—a physical or virtual environment that recontextualizes internet culture as an immersive spatial experience. Each student will create an interpretive architecture that synthesizes their research into a navigable, multi-sensory encounter. These museums will not only curate meme culture but challenge the limits of representation, permanence, and authorship in the digital age.

ARCH 202 S24

2024

BRIEF

Our homes have historically served as an apparatus for physically rendering a society. From delineating the roles of different genders to reinforcing distinctions of class and race, domestic enclosures were instrumentalized beyond their function as dwellings. The four walls and gable roofs have become entangled with broader economic and political dynamics, perpetuating inequities rooted in established power structures.

Enclosures that generated the division of us/them were often extended beyond their scale. American suburbs were developed with the intensional exclusion of the non-Caucasian race, and the consequence still resonates. In emerging nations, commodified Ville Radieuses have dominated the economics of the real estate market, not only affecting the designs of our homes but also shaping social norms and values. Speculators of distorted utopia have secured the means for apprehending the system’s logic, dominating urban mechanisms and spatial ideologies.

Our studio aims to estrange everyday domestic architecture, narratives, and their surrounding implications. We will form ephemeral imaginaries that act as a mirror for questioning the perpetuated nonsense. Norms, as well as our empirical assumptions on housing and the urban fabric that derives from it, will be interrogated. Preconceived notions will be estranged, and questions in-between will be reconciled. Our works will not be considered as end products but as a collective set of inquiries that challenge the constructed reality.

METHOD

We will explore the relationship between the architecture of domesticity and its production and representation. A series of exercises will encourage students to defamiliarize, manipulate, re-visit, and imagine the concept of domesticity. Students will be introduced to both traditional and emerging mediums including theater, photography, collage, bricolage, morphing 3D animations, augmented reality, and digital frottage. The series of estrangements, rendered via diverse mediums, will culminate in a speculative mixed-used project that becomes a backdrop for living, working, and sharing. We will strive to foster a non-hierarchical dialectic (or non-dialectics) in tackling the architecture of domesticity, as well as our everyday.

TOOLS AND MEDIUM

Our studio sits in-between critical thinking and the culture of craft. The act of making and the artifacts on the table mediate dialogues and collaborations. Both analog and digital works entangle as a medium for discussing environmental, societal, and material issues. Students learn, speculate, and critique the contemporary discourse while making. We explore architecture as a backdrop, space-time, framework, cultural construct, collaboration, and social act.

FINAL PROJECT

The series of defamiliarisation exercises will culminate in a speculative mixed-used project that becomes a backdrop for living, working, and sharing.

ARCH 301 F24

2024

We speculate on steel not only as a building material but also as an “idea” that has been shaping our discourse, profession, and the built environment.

ARCH 302 S25

2025

Domestic Parade is a three-day workshop that invites students to explore the boundaries of domesticity through defamiliarization and estrangement. By bringing household objects into unfamiliar, non-domestic environments, participants collectively transform these spaces into temporary living conditions, questioning deeply ingrained ideas of what constitutes a house, a home, or a city. The workshop begins by identifying representational conventions—such as a child’s iconic gable-roof house or a student’s predictable zoning of kitchen, bedroom, and living room—and challenges these habitual assumptions. Through acts of occupation, displacement, and reconfiguration, students are encouraged to rethink the symbolic and spatial frameworks that shape our everyday understanding of domestic life.

F23 Workshop

2023

The discourse of architecture has been shaped not only via a building but also by other mediums, such as text, paintings, diagrams, and installations. Vitruvius inscribed the discipline via De Architectura, a book, not a building. Renaissance ideals collapsed into a Vitruvian Man, a diagram, not a building. Laugier’s Primitive Hut, an etching, not a building. Modernism and the five points. Post-modern and the decorative shed. The list continues endlessly.

These non-built mediums have played a significant role in the history of Architecture. Piranesi’s speculative drawings, later written by Tafuri, became a fundamental inspiration for the deconstructive movement. Architecture Without Architects exhibition allowed the discipline to reflect on its narrow, euro-centric aperture. Vriesendorp's surreal paintings, based on the paranoid critical method, opened a new chapter for architecture and urbanism. In the contemporary scene, architects are starting to narrate the complexities of our built environment via emerging mediums such as VR, AR, animations, and speculative renderings. Yes, architects make buildings, but buildings are not the only clay in molding our discipline.

This course examines all non-buildings that are still architecture. Mediums we will cover include both traditional and emerging, such as paintings, collages, etchings, sculptures, VR, AR, AI, and animations. A series of lectures will introduce students to how architects have been shaping, framing, and often rupturing the discourse via non-building mediums. Paired with the lecture, students will develop projects that speculate the following phrase: “What is architecture.” A series of workshops and tutorials on traditional and emerging mediums will assist students in developing the skill sets required for completion of the course.

By the end of the semester, students will have an independent project that speculates architecture without architecture. The goal of this seminar is not only to learn new tools and mediums but to speculate on our discipline and discourse.

ARCH 498/598

23, 24, 25

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