AAPK is a collective of architects founded in 2018, whose goal is to open a space for exploring new spatial concepts through digital media based on architectural theory.
The main purpose of this activity is to embrace and participate in the diverse digital architectural experiments taking place around the world, particularly in the Korean language.
Currently, AAPK is based in Frankfurt, Germany and Seoul, and its first group of four members have participated in three virtual reality-based architectural exhibitions in Venice, Frankfurt, and Munich.
The publication of Architecture as Fabulated Reality is AAPK's first official initiative.
This publication was planned in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name, but the exhibition has been postponed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This book began as a catalog for the exhibition, expanded upon its contents to include related discourses and was completed in the form of an independent volume.
The planning intent and overall composition contained herein are as follows.


Digital space-architectural experiment based on virtual reality

Among the various branches of architectural experimentation based on digital media, AAPK pays particular attention to virtual reality.
Because virtual reality is the medium that most significantly changes the concept and possibilities of space among contemporary media.
Therefore, all of AAPK's projects included in the book are based on virtual reality technology.
Rather than reproducing buildings or existing architectural processes in virtual space, these projects attempt to capture the unprecedented architectural spaces that only these technologies can provide, establishing their own discursive realms.

Architecture book written in both Korean and English

This book is written in both Korean and English, not only for foreign readers, but also to help Korean readers approach the original form of expressions used in Korean.
This is an attempt to reduce the misunderstandings and distance that arise from this, while acknowledging the unfortunate reality that most knowledge in architectural discourse is produced and imported from the Anglo-American world.
For the same reason, all sources cited are in their original texts. AAPK hopes that readers will gain access to the source of knowledge through this book, rather than simply reading its content.
This is all intended to be helpful to those who are learning about architecture in Korean.

The book is divided into two parts: the first half, which contains a collection of discourses, and the second half, which introduces AAPK's work.


First half

The first half consists of four essays and one interview.
The last two essays in this book were first published in English in other journals and have been translated into Korean for this book.
The first half begins with AAPK member Hae-wook Jeong's essay, "The Beginning of a Journey Away from Buildings: Where is Architecture Heading Today?"
This essay introduces the overall context of the book, adding an outsider's perspective to trace the background and reality of how contemporary architecture exists beyond the building itself.


This is followed by Johan Betum's essay, "Constructed Spaces and Stories of Virtual Reality."
An essay by Norwegian architect Johan Betum explores the implications and potential of virtual reality media for architecture today.
He traces the threads of disorder latent in this medium through three frames: image, subject, and virtual space, and argues that virtual reality provides clues for exploring the relationship between human subjects and space, transcending the limitations of existing phenomenology.

The interview, 'What Makes Architecture Today?' was with Austrian architect Peter Trummer.
In this interview, he explains the relationship between architecture and buildings in very simple terms, argues that humans are no longer the ones who create new ideas for architecture, and introduces Zero Architecture, his architectural view on where and how today's architecture comes from.

The following two essays are selected for translation.
First, Michael Young's "Managing the Barrens of Image Wildlands" divides architecture into three ways to engage with the world: ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics, and emphasizes why an aesthetic approach is necessary in today's contemporary context.
In the face of a deluge of images, it is clear that ethical or epistemological approaches to architecture have their limitations.

The second translation, Damian Jovanović's essay "Garden in the Machine: A Story of Architectural Media," explores the speculative history of architectural design media and explores the unique possibilities of contemporary design software.
His argument resonates deeply, pointing out that digital design software should move beyond being relegated to management tools like BIM to becoming a creative force in its own right.

Second half

The second half features virtual reality projects by each AAPK member that were originally scheduled to be exhibited at the eponymous exhibition Virtual-Architecture.
And we begin with AAPK's manifesto, 'Fabulated Reality: Virtual Architecture', which encompasses the thinking behind these projects.

The first work, Go Soo-young's Real-Time Chamber, constructs a virtual urban space where the present of various places is mixed.
It is created by reconstructing real-time images from CCTV cameras installed in five North American cities, and raises fundamental questions about architectural representation through a reality that slides between the image itself and the representation that is intervened.
This is also a critical extension of John May's concept of postorthography, which currently leads the discourse on images in architecture.


The second work, Oh Yeon-ju's Saturated Space, presents a design tool through virtual reality based on gesture and 'carving'.
This project posits architectural drawings as independent aesthetic artifacts that no longer need to be projected onto buildings, appropriating them for entirely different purposes in virtual reality.
This is an attempt to discover new aesthetic possibilities that are latent in drawing, but that even the creators had not anticipated.


The third work, Third Space by Lee Soo-nam, juxtaposes the space of virtual reality with the space of reality, and then creates a mismatch between the tactile information of the real space and the visual information of the virtual space, thereby evoking an alternative sense of space.
The space this project embodies does not belong solely to either physical or virtual reality, but rather brings out the biased subjectivity of humans as subjects who perceive space.

The final work, Jeong Hae-wook's Patched City, argues for the decline of urban space due to the age of images, and focuses on the independent vitality of the morphological characteristics left behind by a city saturated with junk space.
And, based on digital technology, the morphological characteristics of the modern city surface contained in the image are isolated, and through this, the landscape and aesthetic possibilities of another reality are presented through various media that transcend dimensions.