Hidden Layers

from the series “Manual of Cityscape” by Jin Ha Park

Standing beneath the bridge is to stand under the city itself. In Jin Ha Park’s Hidden Layers, we do not merely witness the infrastructures of a megacity; we are invited to contemplate the philosophical and spatial conditions that underpin them. Seoul, a city divided and unified by the Han River, reveals through its 27 bridges and the arteries of Olympic Expressway and Gangbyeonbuk-ro a deep and layered network of movement, power, and memory. Park’s lens does not observe as a mere user of the space but interrogates it—as a former architect turned photographer, he reconstructs the ontology of the urban structure through visual inquiry.

The works resist the superficial reading of infrastructure as mere functionality. Rather, they echo Martin Heidegger’s notion of dwelling—the idea that humans are not simply beings in space but beings who build, dwell, and think. In these photographs, the bridge is not a passageway but a site of existential bearing. Its mass hovers, almost breathes, suspended between earth and sky, functioning less as an object and more as a clearing—what Heidegger called the Lichtung—where the truth of being may unconceal itself.

Aldo Rossi’s theory of the architecture of memory finds resonance here. Just as Rossi viewed the city as a collective archive where architectural elements serve as vessels of historical continuity, Park frames these urban masses as vessels of accumulated time. The concrete pillars and steel skeletons are not only feats of engineering, but imprints of a city's evolving self-consciousness. The repetitive forms reveal a quiet monumentality—forms that do not assert dominance but offer silent testimony to the endurance of human ordering of nature.

This is also a cityscape read through movement. As Bernard Tschumi argued, architecture is never neutral; it is the site where space, event, and movement intersect. Park’s images, while still, are haunted by motion—the imagined rush of vehicles, the vibration of weight, the anticipation of flow. The photographs capture the latent energy of these infrastructural giants, tracing not only their form but their potentialities, their future unfolding. This is the metropolis seen through a chronotope: a convergence of temporal and spatial dynamics.

The urban imaginary that Park constructs also engages with Kevin Lynch’s conception of imageability. In place of legible nodes and paths, Park offers visual narratives that are more elusive, yet no less structured. His frames guide us through underpasses and shadows, edges and voids, where orientation is as much emotional as it is spatial. In doing so, he renders visible what cities so often obscure—the textures of their hidden logics, the poetry embedded in concrete.

Ultimately, Hidden Layers challenges us to rethink how we see the city—not as a backdrop for human activity, but as an agentive presence. These images call not for interpretation but for attentiveness. They remind us, through their weight and stillness, that the city is not just built; it is being continually revealed.

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