Breathing earth sphere, 2024 

Museum of the Earth – Docho Island, Korea

A tree-lined path ascends from the harbour of Docho Island to the top of a hill, leading through lush landscaping developed in collaboration with SeoAhn Total Landscape. At the summit is an outlook with a bench and a single Korean Hackberry tree (Celtis koraiensis), a species with particular significance in Korea, where it is used to mark sites for public gathering. The bench invites visitors to sit and contemplate the view of the surrounding countryside and distant sea.

Continuing along the path, visitors encounter a complex geometrical latticework dome. The pattern, derived from decades of research undertaken at Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, is based on three-dimensional forms that have been flattened into two dimensions and then wrapped along the surface of a sphere.

The open frame of the dome allows daylight to stream down into a subterranean space below. Visitors may enter this space by following a path back down the hill to an opening in the earth that resembles the mouth of a cave. Inside, the bowl-like heart of the pavilion is clad in colourful lava-stone tiles that echo the geometric pattern of the dome above. The colourful tiles produce an illusion of three-dimensional forms tumbling through space. Reds and greens indicate surfaces that would be in shadow if they were illuminated from above, and cyan creates highlights. Diamond-shaped tiles are shared by the two illusory polyhedrons simultaneously, causing the different forms to pop into the foreground or recede behind the others depending on the viewer’s perception of the whole.