Yoon Ji-Hwan was born in 1986 in Yeongju, a small city in North Gyeongsang province known principally for its three-hundred-year-old wooden academy, the Sosuseowon. He would later describe the experience of growing up within walking distance of the academy as learning what weight could be, before learning what design was.
He left Korea at nineteen to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His thesis project, a series of unbuilt proposals for a secular monastery in the Alps, drew its logic from Korean temple carpentry and Roman concrete — an early statement of the preoccupation that would define his studio: the slow, structural mass that refuses ornament.
He returned to Seoul in 2016 and spent two years working at an architectural firm in Gangnam. In 2018, frustrated by the scale at which buildings resolve, he founded Solum with the conviction that a single well-made object could carry the same seriousness. The studio's first piece — a walnut bench since retired from the catalogue — was shown at a small gallery in Hannam and sold on the opening night.
He has since been quiet about the why. A chair is an argument about a room, he has said in one of his few published interviews. The argument should be complete. The room should not need persuading.