Architecture Competition The Last Nuclear Bomb Memorial / Edition #2 3rd prize winner – Youngjae Shin and Byungdoo Youn

We’d like to take the opportunity to introduce you to the 3rd prize winners of our "The Last Nuclear Bomb Memorial" #2 competition – Youngjae Shin and Byungdoo Youn from South Korea!

3rd prize winners

Youngjae Shin is a landscape designer and gardener, interested in ethics and ecological sensitivity in modern society. He was a former associate at HLD, a landscape design studio based in Seoul, Korea. Youngjae received his BLA degree from the University of Seoul and was awarded the Dean's Award for his graduation project ‘Memorial for the Gachang Valley Massacre’.

Byungdoo Youn is a landscape designer at HLD. He believes in the transformative potential of landscape as a cultural and ecological medium. He received a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Brief information about the projects that you/your company have been involved with. For instance, what scale have you focused on/preferred, any significant projects where the company/ individuals have been involved?

Youngjae Shin and Byungdoo Youn are creative landscape designers who are passionate about discovering delicate beauty and tragedy that our world embraces and deriving places for them. We focus on various scales from designing a small memorial for fallen trees to planning green network plan for Seoul.

What does architecture mean to you and what is the role of an architect in your society?

As landscape designers, we should capture what people have lost in this era which includes a sense of wonder, respect for others (including non-human) and careful concern for generations to come. Design is not limited to merely physcial space, but rather incorporate whole range of fields including literature, music, and art. And all these subjects should reflect the once lost poetics of the world.

Why do you participate in architecture competitions?

Competitions could be a fascinating glimpse of being passionate, creative, experimental, more serious, and be desperate on something that you really care about. You don’t have to struggle with bureaucracy, budget, or worry being political means.

What advice would you give to individuals who struggle to decide whether it would be beneficial for them to participate in architecture competitions?

If you like the topics and want to give yourself a chance to develop idea, just do it. It gives you much more than you think. You have at least 3 hours a week to work on it, that's enough.