--- title: "The Water Opens the Way — Honourable Mention — GENDO 48: Soldagen | Gendo" url: https://gendo.ai/gendo-48/soldagen/winners/the-water-opens-the-way description: "In conversation with Hojun Baek — Honourable Mention, GENDO 48: Soldagen. Generating an image wasn't the end of the process. Quite often, it was the beginning of the next question." lang: en --- Soldagen winners: https://gendo.ai/gendo-48/soldagen/winners GENDO 48: Soldagen — Honourable Mention # The Water Opens the Way Hojun Baek · Mogwa Image: The Water Opens the Way — GENDO 48: Soldagen board (https://gendo.ai/_assets/marketing/soldagen-entries/127eb3e7-56a4-42c9-80a3-7ad0bb286f2e.jpg) Open the live design canvas to inspect every prompt, variation and decision. Open canvas (https://gendo.ai/app/project/1e85b716-cc71-4965-acb0-5a97cc3cd71a) In conversation > “Generating an image wasn't the end of the process. Quite often, it was the beginning of the next question.” > > Hojun Baek · Mogwa 01 ## Tell us about yourself, and what brings you to competitions like this. I'm Hojun Baek, a 20-year-old creative planner based in South Korea. As a student, I loved art and wanted to become an artist. Over time, I realised that what I enjoyed most was developing an idea and figuring out how to make it happen. When I started working with AI, I found myself writing code, something I'd never imagined doing. That eventually led me to take part in a hackathon. That curiosity is what brought me to GENDO 48. I had never studied architecture, but I wanted to see what would happen if I took an idea seriously enough to follow it into a field I knew almost nothing about. 02 ## What did you design, and what were you trying to communicate? My proposal began with a simple question: what if water didn't just exist inside the architecture, but actually created the way to reach it? Vindstad is a place where the landscape changes dramatically with the seasons, so I wanted the architecture to change with it rather than sit there as a fixed object. I imagined a series of bathing spaces connected by paths that would gradually appear as warm water met the snow. More than designing a single building, I was interested in designing a sequence of moments across the landscape, and in asking whether architecture could be something that reveals itself through time. 03 ## How did you approach the timeframe, and where did Gendo fit into the process? Because architecture was unfamiliar to me, I didn't begin by trying to design a building. I began by researching Vindstad — the changing light, snow, movement through the landscape, and the way people actually arrive and spend time there. I kept asking questions until one observation began to connect several of them together. From there, the process became very iterative. I would form an idea, visualise it, realise something was wrong, go back to the research, change it and try again. Gendo became especially useful in that loop. Instead of waiting until I knew exactly what something should look like, I could make an idea visible very quickly and react to it. Generating an image wasn't the end of the process. Quite often, it was the beginning of the next question. 04 ## How has your relationship with Gendo developed? GENDO 48 was my first time really putting Gendo through an entire project. At first, I treated it mostly as a way to turn something in my head into an image. As the project went on, I became less interested in getting the "right" image on the first attempt and more interested in using each result to decide what to do next. When you're working in an unfamiliar field, there's often a gap between what you imagine and what you're able to describe or make. Gendo made that gap much smaller. By the end, I wasn't really thinking of it as a rendering tool. It had become part of the way I was thinking through the project. 05 ## What does the recognition mean to you, and what would you do differently next time? The recognition meant a lot because I entered without an architecture background. I didn't enter to prove that expertise doesn't matter — if anything, the competition showed me how much there is to learn. But receiving an Honourable Mention made me feel that not knowing a field yet doesn't have to be a reason to stay outside it. Next time, I'd spend less time trying to produce more and more material, and more time deciding what actually deserves to remain. Knowing what to remove matters just as much. 06 ## Anything else you would like to share about GENDO 48? What I enjoyed most was the time limit. It is short enough that you can't wait until you feel ready. You have to make decisions, make mistakes, and keep moving. I came in curious about what I could make in architecture, and left curious about what field I might try next. Previous Første lys https://gendo.ai/gendo-48/soldagen/winners/f-rste-lys Next Mot sola https://gendo.ai/gendo-48/soldagen/winners/mot-sola