In March, ArtAsiaPacific joined architect Ole Scheeren on a walkthrough of the Róng Museum of Art, an ambitious new home for visual and digital culture taking shape in Shenzhen. Barely seven months later, the founder of Büro Ole Scheeren has unveiled a very different proposition: a low-lying, partly sunken gallery for digital media art in Suseong, a residential district in southeast Daegu.

Named Suseong Continuum, the project was commissioned for the Suseong International Biennale. Unlike conventional biennials that favor ephemeral pavilions, the event invites architects, landscape designers, and urban planners to create permanent civic infrastructure across Daegu—part of a long-term effort to give the city a stronger cultural identity. Scheeren’s proposal is on view at this year’s edition, “Living Ground,” through November 22. Construction begins in 2027, with the building scheduled to welcome visitors for the 2028 Biennale.

Although best known for high-rises and mixed-use complexes, Scheeren has routinely worked across scales. In Suseong, he adopts a deliberately modest one: a single low structure emerges from a neighborhood park beside a lotus pond, its coarse concrete exterior giving way to a pale, screen-ready interior with no partitions to interrupt the visitor’s journey. The ambition is less about making a landmark than about rethinking how people encounter art composed of light and data.

In this interview, Scheeren reflects on how a Korean tree found its way into the building’s surfaces, why a long dialogue with the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe helped shape the gallery’s logic, how the formative late-1990s exhibition “Cities on the Move” in Southeast Asia still informs his practice, and whether architecture can keep pace with art forms that have yet to be invented.

Your buildings have long treated the city as a living organism. With Suseong Continuum, you seem to want to dissolve the boundary building and terrain. How did the site at Yeonhonae-ji, set between park, lotus pond, and mountains, shape this thinking?

Rather than dissolving, I see it more as a continuation, as a form of spatial gradient. The idea is to form a gradual transition from landscape to architecture, and from the physical reality of nature to the virtual world of a gallery dedicated to digital art.

A single meandering path winds through the park and materializes as the volume of the gallery. It twists, expands, and contracts in response to the triangular shape of the site, the pond, and the park’s pathways, and it negotiates the changing levels of the terrain as a means of tying everything together. You don’t arrive at the building so much as find yourself already inside it, still walking the same path you started in the park.

The gallery is partly embedded in the earth, which naturally stabilizes its internal temperature against the hot summers and cold winters of the local climate. Its solid concrete walls are imprinted with timber formwork made from the pine trees found in abundance locally. In Korea, the pine carries deep cultural significance as a symbol of integrity and longevity. 

When we met in March during a site visit to the Róng Museum, you spoke of designing as a “layering of possibilities.” Here, that possibility appears again, as something digital rather than institutional. What led you to abandon the sequential logic of the conventional contemporary art museum and its white cube format, and instead treat the gallery as one continuous spatial experience? 

The question is what digital art is really about, and how it wants to be experienced. In essence, digital space has no fixed body or form. It exists in numeric abstraction, and its representations are mostly made of light, sound, data, and time. It no longer inhabits distinct, singular spatial entities; I think it exists in what I would rather describe as environments, living in overlaps and connections where one condition can merge into the next at any time. Yet digital art is still mostly shown in spaces inherited from other media, in neutral isolated chambers. I wanted to create a more ambient space that shares the fluidity of the digital itself, where an experience doesn’t stop and restart at distinct thresholds but keeps unfolding as you move.

At the Róng Museum of Art, the question was how architecture could help shape an institution and its role in a rapidly growing city. Suseong is something quite different. It is local and intimate in scale, rooted in a neighborhood and its park. The gallery’s movements offer gradually changing internal and external conditions without prescribing what each one has to be. It is open to interpretation through the artworks it will host and the people who walk through it. 

Digital art, as you have observed, thrives on overlap and continual transformation rather than isolation. ZKM | Center for Art and Media, a pioneering institution in your home city of Karlsruhe, is also a collaborator on this project. How did working with them, and perhaps your own memories of the institution, help translate that new media logic into architectural form?

ZKM was one of the first institutions globally to formally recognize media as an art form. It treated art, science, and technology as one continuous field rather than separate disciplines, an approach very close to how I think about our architecture for this gallery.

Our dialogue with ZKM has given a strong focus to the interpretation and possible representation of media art: how it is conceived, how it behaves, and how it is constantly reinvented. With Suseong Continuum, we translated this into a spatial experience: how people move, observe, interact, and remember.

Beyond ZKM, which museums or cultural institutions focused on new media and digital art, in Asia or elsewhere, shaped your thinking as you developed the proposal for Suseong’s continuous spatial model? Were there particular spatial strategies or curatorial approaches you sought to expand or move beyond?

In 1999, I worked with the curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru on “Cities on the Move,” a large-scale exhibition about the Asian city. After touring museums and galleries in the West, it moved to Bangkok, where, instead of staying within the walls of a single museum, it became an urban intervention. We spread the show across the city through a network of institutional, academic, and alternative spaces, indoors and out, with artworks woven into everyday urban life. The central question of its scenography was not simply how to accommodate a series of artworks, but how to merge them with their actual context—the city, which was the very subject of its curatorial interest. I have been exploring these themes ever since: how art and its contexts relate, which conditions particular forms of art engage, and what idea of space we can derive from them.

You have said that architecture should anticipate the lives it will contain and move away from what you have called the “detrimental straitjacket” of the modernist mantra “form follows function.” In a gallery without rooms or doorways, how will you choreograph visitors’ journeys so that the atmosphere shifts gradually rather than abruptly at a threshold?

The core idea of Suseong Continuum is a spatial gradient in which change happens continuously and one condition morphs into the next. Traditional thresholds dissolve into a more continuous understanding of digital space. Light, sound, enclosure, and immersion shift gradually as you move. Curving walls widen into open spaces and tighten into passages. Atmospheres transform rather than switch.

Materials carry that journey too. Outside, the concrete is rough and you walk on gravel. Inside, the surfaces slowly become smoother and whiter, calibrated for digital projection, and the floor becomes polished concrete. Along the route, you pass through states of contemplation, encounter, and full immersion without the works ever being completely isolated from one another. They can form one continuous condition, but can also occupy different sections of the path individually. I like that ambiguity. It doesn’t impose one way of reading.

With media technology evolving so rapidly, how are you ensuring Suseong Continuum remains relevant over the decades? Is the ambition a form of architectural timelessness, and how does separating a durable concrete shell from a flexible technical layer support this vision?

Buildings generally outlive the technologies inside them, so what interests me about time is understanding change and anticipating new possibilities. 

For the gallery, you can think of two kinds of time. The physical concrete shell is about endurance: durable, robust, embedded in the earth and carrying the memory of the site. The technical layer is ephemeral: projections, sound, and systems that can be replaced and reinvented as often as the art demands. We designed that layer as hidden infrastructure running along the entire path, with power, data, and mounting points concealed in ceilings and floors but accessible and replaceable over time. For visitors it is almost invisible, so the experience remains one of pure space and atmosphere. For technicians, it is fully accessible, so artists and curators can reconfigure the gallery quickly. In a way, the building doesn’t have to predict what digital art will look like in 30 years. It only has to stay open to it and allow diverse possibilities to unfold.

Elaine W. Ng is editor and publisher of ArtAsiaPacific.