Mimesis Art Museum

Character

On 28 November 2007, about one hundred ready-mix concrete trucks arrived at the Mimesis construction site. The roof-slab pour ran until around 8 p.m.; finishing work continued until 2 a.m. The museum's own building diary records the day almost like a campaign log

That amount of concrete eventually became something architect Carlos Castanheira chose to describe as a cat. Álvaro Siza's first gesture for the project was a curled, opening form; Castanheira later wrote that the building could be read as a cat stretching and yawning. From outside, two pale concrete masses sweep away from each other, their upper walls almost blank while doors and windows gather low near the ground

The site has quieter stories too. During construction, five maple trees estimated at roughly 70 to 80 years old were found at a farm in Paju, dug out and moved for the museum garden. In 2008 James Turrell visited the still-unfinished museum

The experience

The exterior prepares you for weight; the interior keeps giving that weight away. White walls, oak-toned floors and curved ceilings are cut by windows, voids and changing levels. A gentle spiral stair carries the route upward, and on the way to the third floor a circular skylight about 2.5 metres across slowly appears overhead

The skylight is only half the mechanism. Beneath it, a second suspended ceiling catches direct sunlight and turns it into softer indirect light that spreads sideways. Another high side window brings light across the stair wall. The result changes by hour and season because the galleries are not simply illuminated from fixtures; the building keeps redirecting daylight through curves, cuts and overlapping ceilings

There are deliberate places to stop looking at art and look at the building instead. The second-floor lobby opens across the first-floor volume like an internal overlook. Near the central garden, a broad curved window frames the outside. Downstairs, a courtyard brings a tree up between ground and basement, with a small dark doorway beyond it

The museum is not enormous: the total floor area is about 3,663 square metres. A window seen from one level can reappear from another, and walls that looked almost sealed outside open into different relationships from within

History

Open Books bought the Paju site in April 2005. Before signing with Siza that November, the client made a study trip through several of his buildings in Portugal and London and also visited Naoshima and Tadao Ando's architecture. Construction began in September 2006

The official construction chronology is unusually detailed. It records curved steel formwork, concrete inspections by Carlos Castanheira, Siza checking interior details in August 2008, James Turrell visiting that October, and the main architectural work reaching completion in January 2009. Siza returned in December 2009 for a final interior review

The museum was built by Siza with Castanheira and Korean architect Kim Junsung. ArchDaily published the architects' own account under a wonderfully unhelpful proposition: a cat had become a museum. Behind the joke was a difficult cast-concrete project whose smooth curves depended on formwork, repeated corrections and an unusually exact relationship between wall, ceiling and daylight

Before you go

Mimesis sits inside Paju Book City rather than central Paju. The current museum schedule is 10:00–19:00 daily with no regular closing day listed, although temporary closures are announced separately. The standard adult ticket is ₩11,000

From Seoul, bus 2200 runs from Hapjeong toward the Lotte Premium Outlet or Ichae Shopping Mall stops, followed by about a five-minute walk. Bus 081 from GTX-A Unjeong Jungang Station stops at Simhakgyo, about a minute away on foot