Glocal: acting global, acting local: John Hong and Jinhee Park

John Hong. Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jinhee Park. Lecturer in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Single Speed Design explores a version of sustainability that approaches design as a convergent, interdisciplinary, and collaborative venture. They favor an economy of means over an additive and redundant methodology: simultaneously exploring the different aspects of architecture, landscape, history, and social systems, so that minimum form can take maximum effect.

The design firm run by Korean born John Hong and Jinhee Park, has defined a kind of “sustainable minimalism” using low-tech materials in a low-energy way. They first became known for the construction of a single family house in Lexington made mostly out of discarded demolition rubbish from the old Central Artery of Boston. By recycling of ordinary materials, the Big Dig House was an early move in a consistent philosophy that looks for environmental performance. Jinhee Park has just been awarded the AIA Young Architects Award for 2009; John Hong was awarded the same prize for 2006. With offices in both New York and Cambridge, their current buildings include projects of very different scale but same ambition: a house in Newton, a Clover food truck, the 8 Towers of Ordos 100 in inner Mongolia recently exhibited in Art Basel and an Exhibition and Cultural Space at the heart of the Heyri Art Valley in South Korea.