Maria Shéhérazade Giudici
Since the 1990s, the goshiwon—which began as a rentable private room for study—has become one of South Korea’s fastest-growing residential types, providing housing for single people on small budgets. In her essay “Alone Like the Horn of a Rhino,” Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, traces its rise in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and likens it to a contemporary boarding housing, in that it offers individuals the opportunity to “go alone,” to live autonomously outside of the family sphere. Giudici interprets the goshiwon as a radical alternative to dominant “APT” model, based on the Western nuclear-family household and its embedded hierarchies. The goshiwon flips the logic of the APT by externalizing reproductive labor and internalizing work, thereby challenging to the norm of what “home” is, as well as what is “work.” Yet this type also presents problems, such as poorly designed retrofitted spaces, little or no shared facilities, furthermore it depends on domestic work provided by poorly paid workers. Giudici takes on these opportunities and contradictions as a starting point for her proposal: “Out with a Bang,” a project for contemporary boarding houses that re-interprets the goshiwon, with less typologically defined units, more neutral and flexible spaces. The project also directly confronts the problem of the exploitation of domestic labor by making reproductive work collective, visible, and spatially celebrated. While Seoul’s “city of rooms” has been so far a response to a crisis, Giudici suggests that it could also become the starting point for an architectural project that could change the way we think about the postindustrial city at large.