HYUNGGYU KIM

What remains of architecture when its unified form decays, yet persists through juxtaposed fragments? This presentation rebuilds the democratic process of designing through digital ruins.

The Heideggerian Ideal
Architecture reveals its meaning through direct, physical presence (Dasein).
“To build is to dwell” — we experience space by being physically present through material, place, and care (Heidegger 1971).

The Networked Reality
The image precedes the visit.
Architecture circulates first as fragments, photographed, hashtagged, and digitally reshared.
Perception arrives already framed by algorithms and repetition.

Architecture has long been grounded in presence: for Heidegger, to build is to dwell, to be present through material, place, and care. Yet today the first encounter with architecture often unfolds through a screen. The image precedes the visit; perception arrives already framed by algorithms and repetition. Before it is built or seen, the building exists as a constellation of mediated fragments.

Afterimage
An optical illusion after looking at a bright light/color.
Highly clinical, technical, and objective.
Physiological.
The “immediate” after.
See / Experience.
The camera flash was so bright that it left a purple afterimage in my eyes for several minutes.

Jansang (잔상)
A visual / mental remaining after the source is gone.
Carries feelings of longing, nostalgia.
Phenomenological.
The “extended” present.
Remain / Flicker before one’s eyes.
The film’s final images left a jansang (lasting resonance).

This calls for an expanded notion of experience. The Korean term Jansang – literally «afterimage» – names not only the physiological residue of vision but its emotional and cultural resonance. Unlike the clinical English term, Jansang bridges the perceptual, the emotional, and the cultural: buildings endure not only through matter but through afterimages continually generated and re-circulated by collective imagination.

Jansang reframes decay not as degradation but as a catalyst for reimagining how we design together.

83 Church Ruins
In the past, the church was never an ‘island’ in the middle of a square. It was built into the walls of the plaza, forming the very heart of the town’s living room. Sitte (1889)

Camillo Sitte called the church the anchor of the European town—the primary wall of an “outdoor living room,” the spatial heartbeat giving the square its meaning and scale. But churches have grown dysfunctional; their inherited functions no longer match the symbols they once held. So I began visiting them more often.

This draws on fieldwork from 2017 to 2025 across 83 church ruins in Germany, Sweden, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The aim was not to catalogue them as static objects but to read them as living containers of perception, where material decay and fragmented collective perception coexist. Each was documented photographically, attentive to how it might become architectural language.

Recurring Motifs

Nature — ivy, trees, moss reclaiming walls.
Sky as ceiling — ruins open to the heavens.
Where we meet the sky (1) — phenomenal transparency (frames, openings).
Where we meet the sky (2) — thresholds of light and atmosphere.
Where we meet the sun — sunbeams, shadows, seasonal rhythms.
Other usages — adaptation for culture, gatherings, events.
Palimpsest – visible layers of history.
Cityscape — ruins integrated into urban memory and everyday life.
Collective Memory (Halbwachs 1992).

Recurring motifs appeared across locations, not just at single sites. The research expanded into digital ethnography, tracing hashtags and image clusters that show users re-composing the same spatial frames. These repetitions form what Halbwachs calls collective memory: a dynamic network in which shared perception reshapes the identity of place. The result is a distributed monumentality—a monument sustained not in stone but through the continual act of seeing and sharing.

Nature

Sky as Ceiling

Where we meet the sky 1 phenomenal transparency

Where we meet the sky 2

Where we meet the sun

Another Usage

Palimpsest

Cityscape

The Ruïnekerk in Bergen is the paradigmatic case. Built in the fifteenth century and ruined in the Dutch Revolt of 1574, it remains the town’s civic centre—a void turned communal heart, its open walls and ceiling letting the sky participate architecturally and turning absence into continuity. Alois Peitz reads such ruins as transformations between sacrality and publicness, mediating remembrance and re-use. Markets, concerts, and festivals now inhabit the void once devoted to worship – a post-secular coexistence where sacred and everyday overlap.

It is also a digital landmark. Thousands of images repeat the same visual rhythm – west façade, cross-shaped openings, brick against sky. Far from redundant, each repetition reinforces a collective image, making the ruin at once material site and immaterial network: an architectural double exposure.

Foucault to Derrida

Hétérotopie
Spaces that mirror and invert others—real yet imaginary, ordered yet subversive.
The Ruïnekerk as such a heterotopic field – an architectural fragment simultaneously embedded in civic life and dispersed across digital media.

Khôra
As a receptacle that holds and transforms meaning, Khôra offers a metaphor for the in-between space of Jansang—the interval between presence and absence, material and image. Here, perception itself becomes a site of transformation.

Foucault’s heterotopia describes the Ruïnekerk well: a fragment embedded in civic life and dispersed across digital media. Derrida’s Khôra offers a metaphor for the in-between of Jansang: the interval between presence and absence, material and image, where perception itself becomes a site of transformation.

Collective Memory and Subjectified Jansang

Objectified Jansang
Fixed, institutional and choreographed.
Prescribed in terms of experience.
Through the continuous reproduction of an originally envisioned, top-down image.

Subjectified Jansang
Unstable, affective, and democratic.
Self-directed field conditions: individual stories reconstructed from fragmented brick remnants.
Through collective authorship and personal engagement requiring imaginative participation.

Jansang distinguishes the objectified from the subjectified afterimage. The first refers to fixed, institutional icons—the Eiffel Tower. The second refers to democratic perceptions reshaped through collective authorship. The Ruïnekerk belongs to the second: its identity comes not from official preservation but from everyday gestures of photographing, posting, sharing. This repetition turns viewing into ritual, echoing Deborah Lewittes’s reading of contemplating ruins as civic imagination rather than nostalgia. Each act of framing reactivates the ruin as a participatory monument.

Toward a Democratic Architecture of Perception

Post-secular society (Habermas)
Dasein (Heidegger)
Hététeropie (Foucault)
Khôra (Derrida)
Democratic Church (Peitz)
Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (Kasack)

Through the framework of Jansang, the entire journey since 2017 can be understood as a continuous process of reconsidering what decay means. By offering an exemplary case, Ruïnekerk, collecting and juxtaposing digital memories shared among people, decay becomes an immersive experience, not as degradation but as a form of activation, as memory, as ruin, and as rhythm.

This process is an act of participation. It is a democratic way of perceiving, remembering, and rebuilding collectively.

Image production contribution by Kwang Min Lee.