TIME FRAME: A Steel Grid Framework That Lets a Learning Landscape Absorb Decades of Change

Every building is drawn for a present that will expire. Rooms get labels, corridors get widths, materials get specified against today's brief, and then the brief changes. TIME FRAME refuses to design for that single moment. It asks what in architecture survives shifting technologies, lifestyles and expectations, and answers with two things: the human need to gather and the human need for shelter. Everything else, the proposal argues, should be left open.

Designed by 기헌 전 and SunWoo Byun, the project was named a Winner of The Architecture of Time 2020. Rather than predicting how people will live decades from now, the designers build a framework capable of accumulating change: protected, compartmentalized rooms below, an open and flexible ground above, and a steel grid that can be filled, emptied and refilled as programmes, users and social behaviours evolve.

Sunken Courtyards Built Around the Act of Gathering

The first constant the designers identify is gathering, and the courtyards make it literal. A sunken lawn is ringed by white perforated steel frames; two people dance on a timber deck while others read along the ledges. Nothing in the space dictates which of those activities belongs there. The frames define an edge and a sense of enclosure without assigning a function, which is precisely the point: meeting, teaching, eating and celebrating can all take root on the same ground.

The second view softens the system. Birch trees cast dappled shade over wooden benches, children play beneath a concrete overhang, and an exposed steel frame stands in the background like scaffolding waiting for its next layer. The juxtaposition matters. Vegetation and occupation, the slow-moving material of time, sit inside a rigid structural order, suggesting that the frame is less a finished enclosure than a host for whatever grows within it.

A Library Hall That Answers the Need for Shelter

If the courtyards stage gathering, the library hall stages shelter, the second human constant the project builds on. Exposed brick upper walls, a grid of skylights and long runs of bookshelves produce an interior that feels stable and protective. Sunlight lands in measured patches on the floor, carrying the column grid's rhythm into the room through light rather than structure.

This is the compartmentalized half of TIME FRAME's argument. The designers note that while construction methods and lifestyles shift, the desire to occupy secure interior space is unlikely to disappear. The library reads accordingly: heavier, quieter and more enclosed than the open ground, a room built to persist while the spaces around it remain free to change.

Two Plans, Two Spatial Worlds Locked to One Column Grid

The plans show how the two systems share a single structural logic. The first floor organizes a library block, square courtyard voids and parking around a regular column grid, with a site section strip running below. The second floor loosens the programme considerably: library, cafe, dining, classrooms, workshop, social lounges and learning spaces arranged around a central courtyard. Read together, the drawings describe a learning campus whose labels already feel provisional.

That provisionality is the design's strength. Because every function sits within the same grid, a classroom could become a lounge, a workshop could become dining, and a void could later be filled. The courtyards act as fixed anchors for gathering while the surrounding programme is free to rotate, giving the project the open-endedness its brief demands without dissolving into a featureless shed.

A Kit of Frame Modules That Turns Time Into Material

The axonometric sheet reveals the mechanism behind the whole proposal: a steel frame cube treated as a base module, then varied with walls, slabs, stairs, fences and membranes. Each variation is a different degree of enclosure, from fully protected room to barely defined outdoor bay. Change happens by adding or removing infill, not by demolishing structure, and that is how the project puts its most compelling idea into practice: time as a design material.

The designers extend materiality beyond brick, concrete, timber, steel and glass to include the accumulated presence of a place. Existing buildings, vegetation, walls and traces of occupation are read as evidence of the present and folded into the site's future identity rather than cleared away. The modular kit gives that philosophy a construction method. Architecture becomes an accumulation rather than a replacement, absorbing successive layers of use without erasing what came before.

Why This Project Matters

Adaptive architecture is often reduced to movable partitions and multipurpose rooms. TIME FRAME pushes the idea further by separating what should endure from what should be allowed to change, then giving each a distinct spatial character. Sheltered rooms and open courtyards are not interchangeable; they are two permanent conditions that host an impermanent programme. That clarity is what keeps the proposal from becoming a generic flexible grid.

Its broader lesson concerns humility. Instead of forecasting the future, 기헌 전 and SunWoo Byun design for the needs they can be confident about, gathering and shelter, and leave the rest to the people who will inherit the building. For a competition themed on time, treating a site's existing layers and its future occupants as co-authors is a fitting and persuasive answer.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: 기헌 전, SunWoo Byun

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Project credits: TIME FRAME by 기헌 전, SunWoo Byun The Architecture of Time 2020 (uni.xyz).