STUDIO HEECH

Located in Gongcheonpo, Namwon-eup, on the southern coast of Jeju, a volcanic island at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, the Pilgrim's House began as an extension of the communal values sustained by the St philip Ecological Village and the Doesalrim Support Association, led by the Korean Catholic priest Fr. Hwang Chang-yeon, into a physical place and a spatial experience. It was conceived as a place where pilgrims could stay for a period without economic burden, encounter the beauty of Jeju's nature, and share and experience the values of faith and prayer, rest and hospitality, and giving. It was completed in 2026.
The Pilgrim's House comprises four buildings, each housing an independent program. Marta's House is a nineteen-room lodging where pilgrims stay. Magdalena's House is a kitchen and dining hall where meals are cooked and shared together. Clara's House is a place for prayer and meditation in silence. Cafe Benedict, which sits directly on the Jeju Olle trail, is planned as a public place of rest for pilgrims, trekkers, and local residents alike.
To “stay” at the Pilgrim's House carries a meaning distinct from a retreat or monastic discipline bound by strict religious practice, and distinct as well from the consumption of ordinary lodging or tourism. It is a way of manifesting the values of the Eco-Village's faith community — experiencing Jeju's nature, cooking and sharing food together, praying, and resting.

Landscape as Territory
Jeju's landscape is experienced, above all, through the shape of the land. As a plane descends toward Jeju, what comes into view is an assembly of countless parcels of land, each differing in size and orientation. Along their irregular, interlocking boundaries run basalt stone walls, within which fields, orchards, greenhouses, and villages sit at varying orientations and densities. This configuration of land was formed as generations of cultivation and occupation, movement and labor, accumulated over Jeju's distinctive terrain.
Studio Heech's proposal for the Jeju Pilgrim's House reads this landscape not as a backdrop or a view, but as landscape as territory. The boundary of the land is not merely a line dividing ownership; it is read as an order formed by the layering, over time, of stone walls and paths, patterns of cultivation and surrounding vegetation, and the landscapes produced where land meets land. The given site is formed by four parcels, interlocking in the shape of a sandpiper's wings. Rather than a single, massive volume that would work against the surrounding land, village, and coastal landscape, the four buildings are dispersed individually, arranged according to program and site conditions.

Ritual Promenade
A pilgrim's path, deliberately laid along the boundary of the site, connects the four independent buildings with several outdoor gardens and spaces for meditation. To move from one building to another, pilgrims must repeatedly step outside and walk the land, experiencing the surrounding landscape as it changes sequentially along the site's irregular boundary. In this process, they meet Jeju's stone walls and vegetation, wind and rain, strong sunlight, and weather that shifts moment to moment.
The time and physical effort required to walk, and the direct contact with nature that occurs in the process, become essential elements that constitute the architecture itself. Moving repeatedly between inside and outside, and at times enduring difficult weather while walking the land, pilgrims come to experience architecture not as a fixed object but as a continuous experience of body and time.
Behind this ritual promenade lies the practice of sharing and solidarity that the Eco-Village community has sustained. During the pandemic, Fr. Hwang Chang-yeon organized an online community to connect people experiencing social isolation, building relationships in which they could share their daily lives and hardships and find comfort in one another. The Pilgrim's House extends this communal experience once again into a physical place, within nature. Here, pilgrimage is not confined to a specific religious act. Moving one's own feet, receiving the changes of weather through the body, and sharing time and space with others also become part of the pilgrimage. The everyday acts of staying, eating together, praying, walking, and resting are connected through the path and transformed into one continuous experience.

Trees and Stone Already on the Land

The Pilgrim's House accepts what already exists on the land, and the surrounding nature, as the conditions that organize the architecture. The mature trees that had long stood on the site were preserved without exception. The buildings and paths were arranged to avoid the existing trees, so that the landscape formed by the relationship with the neighboring site, and the view of the citrus orchards, would remain undamaged.
Stone, the symbol of the volcanic island of Jeju and a marker of its regional identity, was likewise adopted as a material connecting the conditions of the site. Just as Jeju's traditional stone walls were formed by re-stacking, along boundaries, the natural stone that emerged from the land in the course of cultivating farmland, the Pilgrim's House gathered the basalt produced during site clearing and excavation and reused it in the stone walls and exterior stonework.

Weather Machine: Climate-Responsive Architecture
Jeju's stone storehouses, dolchanggo, are a building type unique to the region, formed in response to the island's volcanic geology and its harsh climate of strong wind, rain, and salt. Using the limited materials available on a stone-rich island, and responding to the external environment through simple, solid construction, this type is not confined to vernacular architecture of the past. The principle it embodies — using locally available materials and responding to climate through minimal construction — remains a valid logic of construction in architecture today.
At the same time, the dolchanggo, having existed as part of Jeju's landscape for a long time, is also an emotional and cultural memory through which the place of Jeju is recognized today. Rather than reproducing the form of the stone storehouse, the Pilgrim's House translates, in a contemporary way, the relationships between material and climate, structure and construction, embedded within it. Clara's House, built for prayer and meditation, is the building in which this attempt is most directly expressed. Its exterior wall reinterprets the thick, solid envelope of the dolchanggo in a contemporary method of construction, using Jeju basalt, while its roof is supported by eight timber columns standing independently within the interior. The heavy stone envelope and the light timber structure perform distinct structural roles, together forming a new architectural order.

Circulation of Water
Jeju receives frequent typhoons and heavy rainfall, yet the high permeability of its volcanic bedrock has long made the storage and securing of water an important challenge. This project treats this climatic and geological condition through the architectural device of water circulation. Marta's House, the largest of the buildings that make up the Pilgrim's House, collects, stores, and purifies rainwater falling on its roof and balconies. The water thus secured is recycled as water for the site's outdoor water features and landscape irrigation; passing through the site, it is returned once again to the landscape.
In this process, the collection and reuse of rainwater does not remain a hidden mechanical system. The purified water is revealed as water features formed along the pilgrim's path, becoming part of the landscape that pilgrims experience directly as they walk and stay.

Local Material and Labour
The naturally occurring basalt once easily gathered from fields and farmland can no longer be found on Jeju. Even the natural stone remaining on the surface has become difficult to find. Under these conditions, building stone walls entirely from natural stone, in the traditional manner, is no longer practically sustainable.
This project accepts this change in the conditions of production as it is. The Pilgrim's House uses basalt produced at local quarries, beginning from the question of how such stone might be used within Jeju's tradition. The traditional construction methods of hotdam (single-wythe wall) and gyeopdam (double-wythe wall) are not simply repeated, but reinterpreted and newly applied to today's material conditions. While the production of material has become industrialized, the work of stacking stone still requires the hand and judgment of a person. Local skilled masons were involved from the design stage, and there was active collaboration throughout construction. Their knowledge and experience, accumulated over a long period of time, were applied once again within today's industrial conditions of production.