Yuha Lotus Cho is a Graphic and Visual Designer, currently designing at Mother Design. She is based in New York, United States and Seoul, South Korea. She was previously at No Ideas. She holds an BFA from the School of Visual Arts. She specializes in brand identity, brand strategy, editorial design, web design, and art direction.
In Time Sensitive, Spencer Bailey writes about The Parallels Between Mountain Climbing and Architecture, by an interview with Tom Kunding, whose practice is deeply shaped by mountain climbing. Kundig describes climbing as an encounter with uncertainty, where preparation matters, but success ultimately depends on how one responds in the moment. For him, the summit is secondary to the way one ascends—the elegance, efficiency, and skill of the process.
Architects are often imagined as precise and controlled. However, my grandfather was the one who totally flipped the concept. He was a free spirit who valued process over outcome, finding meaning in collaboration, patience, and real-time decisions—much like a film director Hong Sang Soo who work without a script.
At first glance, hiking may seem distant from architecture. Yet nature is unpredictable, and building within it is less about control than dialogue.
That is why I feel my grandfather’s architecture resembled hiking: finding a path through uncertainty with patient. And I believe our design practice, too, must learn to arrive at outcomes not by resisting nature, but by engaging with it.
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