OFFICE PROFILE
PWFERRETTO is an Architectural Company based in Seoul and London. The office was founded in 2009 by Peter W. Ferretto after working for a period of 10 years in various international architectural companies, including Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland for 7 years.
The office consists of 6 staff, including two registered architects and a series of young talented designers from around the world. In 2011 PWFERRETTO won first prize in the International Competition for the Busan Opera House and in October 2013 they were appointed winners of the Boheung Pottery museum, a 9,000 m² museum in South Korea and due for completion in 2015.
The office has completed more than 30 projects since its inception and held several international exhibitions in both Korea and China. In March 2014 the first Monograph of their work will be published by G:Colon publishers.
APPROACH
Our approach to architecture can be explained as an experiment in reawakening a sense of wonder in the present environment. We think architecture should stimulate curiosity, bringing people to question their relationship with their surroundings. We are interested in designing spaces from the inside out and see architecture as a composition of rooms (public and private), where ambience and atmosphere create the spatial configuration of the project. With this concept in mind we generate architecture not by gratuitously sculpting form but rather by arranging rooms where form becomes a byproduct of this process.
WORKING PROCESS
When you only see a part, it’s even stronger than seeing the whole. The whole might have a logic, but the fragment takes on a tremendous value in abstraction. Abstraction induces mystery and wonder, creating a kind of obsession of discovery. This happens commonly in films, where mystery is alluded or created via editing. I conceive architecture in the same manner, whereby fragments reveal and create a sense of wonder.
When I design projects I have no premeditated goal or design objective, the project arises almost by chance from the juxtaposition of different ideas, what I call “fragments”, which have infinite ways of being arranged. I don’t have any all-encompassing architectural language; I rely on the fragments to generate propositions in the forms of (mini) narratives.
Fragments allow the project to appear and dissolve through the process, a process which is not progressive but rather associative and reliant on indeterminacy. It is only when you get stuck and pause to contemplate these unknowns that the project comes into focus, like a mosaic that cannot be seen from close range and needs distance to be understood; through this process of interpretation the fragments start to be arranged, to bind with one another to create a singular idea.
