GHOST BARSTAIRS Fills a Doomed Seoul Building With Timber and Steel

Sukchulmok and Kangyeon Lee filled a doomed concrete building in Seoul's Sinsa-dong with timber and steel works — a 'temporary hypothesis' staged before demolition finishes.

Section: Interiors
Author: By Elena Vasquez
Filed: October 12, 2026
Length: 2 min read

Key takeaways

GHOST BARSTAIRS: Temporary Hypotheses is installed in a vacant reinforced-concrete building in Sinsa-dong, Seoul, shortly before demolition is completed.
Design studio Sukchulmok and artist Kangyeon Lee created the exhibition; BRBB design practice contributed a basement installation of self-supporting plywood panels.
A central booth of semicircular timber and a steel cone anchors the first floor; Lee's works use metal and plastic and include a console piece titled Chickens.
The title's three elements — GHOST, BAR, STAIRS — refer to traces, structural lines, and vertical movement.
Photography of the exhibition is by Hong Seokgyu.

A vacant reinforced-concrete building in Sinsa-dong, Seoul, is hosting its final act: an exhibition of timber and steel sculptures installed shortly before demolition is completed.

Design studio Sukchulmok and artist Kangyeon Lee present GHOST BARSTAIRS: Temporary Hypotheses in the Gangnam-gu structure. With accumulated finishes stripped away, the building's exposed structural frame becomes the setting for a show that explores the gap between its former use and an undefined future.

The title itself outlines the project's three parts. GHOST refers to traces of what has disappeared. BAR describes rigid lines that establish new structures and boundaries. STAIRS suggests layers and movement through vertical space.

What fills the concrete shell?

Light enters the building from the basement to the rooftop, illuminating the exposed frame. Inside, Sukchulmok's experimental furniture intersects with Lee's sculptural works.

The studio explores numerical proportions through the physical properties of stone, steel, and wood. On the first floor, a central booth combining semicircular timber and a steel cone anchors the space with a heavy presence.

Lee's sculptures carry a different origin. The artist draws on a past labor experience placing ham on pizza dough on a production line, translating that sense of alienation into works evoking anonymous figures obscured by cycles of consumption and forgetting. His console piece, Chickens, summons those anonymous entities. Using metal and plastic, his sculptures introduce contrasting forms within the raw concrete structure.

Placed within Lee's booth, the artworks transform it into what the team calls a 'hacked' installation — furniture and sculpture intersecting as if in dialogue.

How does the basement intervention work?

A separate spatial intervention by BRBB design practice occupies the basement. Plywood panels meet, curve, and lean against one another to form self-supporting structures that seem to momentarily defy gravity.

These elements operate independently of conventional partitions or circulation routes. The arrangement of materials itself becomes the way to define space.

Set within this unfinished spatial canvas, the installations serve as a 'temporary hypothesis (假設),' a moment caught in transience and a sculptural query cast into the realm of undefined potential.

The exhibition documents a brief interval in which the building's former identity had receded and its future remained open — a temporary state captured before the structure enters its next phase.

Project info: