An impulse to explore the possibilities of taking literal (and serious) the jaded language of a student of architecture on a final review (“…this can be sort of, kind of, whatever…”) is driving the design for a contemporary arts gallery in Seoul, Korea. Her words epitomize a present lack of specificity required from the physical realm as a result of the evaporation of function and emotion into virtual space. Shedding its dreary nuance and exploring the potential in the vacuum her statement identifies has led us to the pursuit of deliberate ambiguity as a design ambition. The surpassing of definition liberates us to explore more elusive notions of mood and desire.

With various intentions, the use of sensorial ambiguity can be seen throughout the history of cultural production, both in Western and Asian tradition. Often as a reaction to hard edge rationalism, the world of deliberate ambiguity resides somewhere between naturalism, Eastern poetry and chiffon lingerie, in something we are trying to define as androgynous Modernism.

In two-dimensional art, one way to create ambiguity is through blurring. This technique can be found in traditional Korean painting, pointillism, Richter etc. In photography, techniques as bokeh, or soft focus, inform the erotic industry but also the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto or Byung-Hun Min, who tactically explore the seductive qualities of the blur.

In the architectural project, other than temporal hazes or fogs currently in vogue - we are trying to create a permanent tactile blur, by deploying and altering a set of material and performance qualities of a stainless steel mesh. The mesh gently drapes around the “hard minimalist white cube”.