Let me introduce myself. I was born in Seoul, Korea in 1957. My family left Korea in 1968 and headed for the Sultanate of Brunei. I went to an English language catholic primary school there. Three years later we moved to the Solomon Islands. I was sent to study in Australia. I attended Westminster School in Adelaide. In 1975 I enrolled at the University of Adelaide where I studied engineering for a year before switching to architecture. After graduating I spent three years working in Singapore and Hong Kong. Returning to Australia, I worked with various large firms before starting my own practice in 1988. I also became an Australian citizen that year. I arrived in Italy in 1994 where I have developed a great interest in literature, scholarship and the humanities in general, of which, architecture remains the main fascination.

If I may explain, in Korea names are generally formed from Chinese characters, even if the Korean phonetic alphabet is the preferred mode of writing nowadays. Chinese is the asian equivalent to Latin. In Chinese the single character is a syllable with its unique meaning. Korean names are composed of three syllables: one for the surname and two for the given name. The surname is always placed first. PAIK (I don't know why Koreans adopted this particular anglicised convention for the spelling but it is pronounced as Bæk) means white. TAE (pronounced Tæ) means high and HO means broad. Given its multi-dimensional amplitude, I thought my name might best translate into English as Magnus White.