Romanesque Architecture – The Slipcase

Korean-born architect Jong-Soung Kimm (*1935) traveled Europe for almost a decade to discover the beauty and power of Romanesque architecture. The result is a series of five richly illustrated books published between 2020 and 2024. They present 80 mainly ecclesiastical buildings in Germany, Belgium, Italy, Croatia, Spain, Portugal, France and England in text and pictures. Each volume has a foreword by a renowned architectural historian or theorist, for example Barry Bergdoll, Fritz Neumeyer, and Winfried Wang. The series, written in English and Korean, is now completed with a decorative slipcase that combines all five volumes.

Jong Soung Kimm (*1935) has his roots in Korea, but he spent his formative years as an architect in Chicago. He was educated at the Illinois Institute of Technology and after graduation he worked in the studio of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for over ten years until 1972. While working for the master, Kimm participated in, among others, the Toronto-Dominion Centre Banking Hal, the Reception Hall on the 54th floor of the T-D Centre, or the 1968 Mies van der Rohe Retrospective at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin; exhibition design proposal for the new Brown Wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. All these projects deal with a unique Miesian mode of creating space which Mies van der Rohe had pioneered since Barcelona Pavilion (1928/29) and Tugendhat House (1928-30). Over the last twenty some years after his return to Seoul in 1978, Jong Soung Kimm has produced a significant body of built work as the lead architect of SAC International, which grew and developed under his participation. Some of the more significant work of architecture will be presented in this exhibition. Kimm’s work is characterized not only by his obvious debt to the principles of Mies van der Rohe, but also by Kimm’s sensibility derived from the cultural milieu he hails from.

Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of art history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and from 2007 to 2019 a curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where from 2007 to 2013 he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. He serves, since 2018, as President of the Board of the Center for Architecture in New York City and a member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury since 2019.

Fritz Neumeyer (*1946) is an architectural theoretician and a professor emeritus. Neumeyer held the chair and professorship for Theory of Architecture at the Technische Universität Berlin. Among other academic appointments, Neumeyer taught at Princeton University and Leuven University. Neumeyer is considered the foremost scholar on the modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Neumeyer’s most famous book is titled „The Artless Word. Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art“, originally published in German in 1986.

Winfried Wang (together with Barbara Hoidn) is the founder of Hoidn Wang Partner in Berlin. Since 2002, he is O’Neil Ford Centennial Professor in Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin.Wang is founding co-editor with Nadir Tharani of 9H Magazine; co-director with Ricky Burdett of the 9H Gallery; Director of the German Architecture Museum. He taught at the Polytechnic of North London, University College London, ETH Zürich, Städelschule, Harvard University, and the Universidad de Navarra, and he is the author and editor of various architectural mono- and topographs, he is also co-editor of the O’Neil Ford Monograph and Duograph Series (published by Wasmuth Verlag) and founding co-editor with Nadir Tharani of 9H Magazine. He served from 1995 to 2000 as the Director of the German Architecture Museum, and was co-director with Ricky Burdett of the 9H Gallery. In addition, he is the Chair of the Schelling Architecture Foundation Executive Committee, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, an honorary member of the Portuguese Chamber of Architects, and a member and deputy director of the architecture section of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.