Korean Crisis Finds Expression in John Marx Drawing

“I call this Crashing Waves. It was a competition entry for the Tongyeong International Music Foundations’s concert hall on a cliff at the southern tip of South Korea. The brief was for the building to serve as a memorial to Isang Yun, an avant-garde composer who was very controversial because he was in favor of reunification. In my concept, North and South Korea are represented by two different forms colliding. Quite a timely political thought.

The pen sketch came first. I remember exactly where I was when I drew it—at the AIA California Council’s Monterey Design Conference. I had signed up to go while we were in the middle of the concert-hall competition. The conference was very inspiring, so I was listening and drawing at the same time. All kinds of ideas came out of that one conference. During the three days, I must have done 40 sketches. I used this one to model the design in Form Z, a 3-D software. Then the 3-D image was turned into a rendering.

This isn’t the version that won the competition, though. My firm, Form4 Architecture, won with another design. And it did get built. Still, to my mind, this sketch is the most interesting.”

> See more from the July 2017 issue of Interior Design