Space Is Felt Before It Is Measured: Lessons from Do Ho Suh

The exhibition takes its name from a Korean expression Suh heard as a child, referring to the hanok, a traditional Korean house that could be disassembled and reassembled elsewhere—literally walked from one location to another.  This portability isn't just physical; it's psychological.  Suh's translucent fabric installations recreate at 1:1 scale the rooms and corridors he has inhabited across Seoul, Berlin, London, and New York, transforming architectural memory into something you can enter, something that moves with you.

Standing inside these spaces—where door handles, intercoms, and towel rails appear as ghost-objects rendered in rose, sea-green, and smoke-blue polyester—felt like being given permission to walk through someone's past.  The translucency mattered.  You see through one home into another, through the fabric into the gallery beyond, through memory into present moment.  Nothing is isolated.  Nothing stands alone.

I completely agree with how Suh describes his work: "The space I'm interested in is not only a physical one but an intangible, metaphorical, and psychological one."  This captures something essential.  Space is felt before it is measured.  We always feel our home even when we are not there—the way it holds us, the way it shaped us, the way it continues to influence how we inhabit wherever we are now.

Storage appears in his work not as closets and cupboards, but as architectural memory itself.  His Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home project involved covering his childhood home's entire exterior with paper and spending nine months rubbing every surface with graphite.  The resulting impressions, reassembled on aluminum scaffolding, become a three-dimensional archive.

Restoration manifests in the softness itself.  The gossamer fabric used in his installations—translucent polyester once worn in traditional Korean summer clothing—creates spaces where boundaries between interior and exterior blur. Permeable thresholds that allow emotional passage.

Kinship threads through Nest/s (2024), an expansive assemblage of colorful sheer structures linking together to form passageways.  Walking through this installation, with its translucent walls in sea-green, rose, and blue, an unexpected image came to mind: the apple green wooden sliding door of my daughter's room.

I seldom use bright color in my home interiors, except for that one door, years ago now.  That sliding door functions like a magic portal for me. Every time I slide it open, it's like entering a space of curiosity, dreamlike, energetic yet calming.  I remember times when my daughter, when she was little, would sit on the wooden floor leaning against that green door and read.  At the bottom corner was a cloth sticker in the shape of a rabbit.  When I'd see her reading, so focused on the pages, that little rabbit was beside her like a quiet companion.

That's what came to mind in Nest/s.  The colors perhaps, but also the threshold quality—how certain spaces become portals between states of being.

Intimacy pulses through the details.  Perfect Home (2024) maps past residences through imprints of doorknobs, switches, intimate architectural details.  Not grand gestures but the quiet points of daily contact, where your hand reaches without thinking, where your body knows the space before your mind names it.

Productivity emerges in unexpected ways.  Suh's practice involves architectural modeling software, 3D printing, traditional Korean ink painting techniques.  His Home Within Home (2025) merges two of his previous homes using these tools, exploring cultural differences he experienced moving from Seoul to the US.

Stimulation appears in the very act of translocation.  Suh began exploring the idea of home after leaving South Korea in 1991, and his childhood home has repeatedly emerged through his work since.  Movement between places doesn't erase previous homes; it layers them.

Moving through Walk the House, I noticed what was present: the visual shimmer of fabric, the spatial disorientation of overlapping architectures, the tactile pull to reach toward stitched surfaces.  While walking through these installations, I was naturally wondering: what if scent were part of the installation?

Suh describes rubbing as "an act of witnessing" and explores "where memory actually resides."  But memory doesn't reside in a single sense.  The smell of your grandmother's kitchen, the particular must of your first apartment, the way home smells when you've been gone too long.  These olfactory signatures work alongside architectural memory, often unconsciously.

If scent had been added to Walk the House, it might have manifested not as a single fragrance per installation, but as layered, translucent scent profiles, echoing the visual transparency of the fabric structures.  Imagine:

• The Seoul Home carrying notes of traditional Korean architecture: hinoki wood, floor wax, the particular quality of aged paper


• The New York apartment fragments holding urban signatures: old radiator heat, coffee shops drifting through thin walls, the metallic tang of fire escapes


• The transitional corridors offering scent that morphs as you move—demonstrating how smell operates at thresholds, always mixing, never discrete

The translucency would become olfactory.  You'd smell through one home into another, the way you see through Suh's fabric layers.  Scent would add temporal depth to spatial memory; because while we can photograph a room, we rarely capture how it smelled, and that absence creates a particular kind of forgetting.

Issues around shelter, safety, and community are inextricably tied to how we perceive home, and for many around the world, those basic needs are in constant peril or upended.  Scent grounds us when other anchors fail.  It's portable the way memory is portable.  You carry it with you, and encountering it again can rebuild entire rooms in your mind.

What makes Suh's work resonate beyond its formal beauty is its recognition that the way we carry places with us can be resource rather than burden.  Active selection rather than passive accumulation.

Environmental psychologist Toby Israel calls this identifying the "high positives from the past environment", those elements from places that gave us comfort, joy, connection. 

The green sliding door that functions as a portal.  The particular quality of light in a childhood bedroom.  The scent of a place where you felt safe.  Not nostalgia. Resources.

Suh demonstrates this through his fabric architectures.  He's not documenting past homes, he's carrying forward what mattered about them.  The doorknobs, the staircases, the corridors: touch-points where body and space met repeatedly, where habit crystallized into memory.

Scent operates particularly powerfully here because it bypasses the narrative mind and speaks directly to the limbic system where emotion and memory intertwine.

Standing in the final gallery with my husband and daughter, watching other visitors move through Suh's translucent corridors, the choice to wait made sense.  The work asks: is home a place, a feeling, or an idea?  The answer matters more when you're standing with the people who help constitute what home means.

The green sliding door in my daughter's room.  The apple green that appeared unbidden while walking through colored fabric.  The little rabbit sticker that was a quiet companion. These details layer over Suh's installations, and his installations layer over my memories, and all of it together creates something neither past nor present but both.

Suh's translucent corridors suggest that the most powerful architecture might be the one you can see through, the one that admits light, the one that acknowledges everything it isn't while being fully what it is.

This is what it means to walk the house: not to leave it behind, but to carry it with you.  Not as weight, but as foundation.

If the idea of space as emotional architecture resonates—if you recognize that your home shapes you as much as you shape it—you might find value in examining how your current environment serves the different aspects of your life. Our Self-Reflection Quiz explores the six functional aspects of home, helping you notice what's already happening in your space.