ALTAR OF THE SEVEN BOOKS

The generic city produced by globalized capitalism starts to show its limits and fragilities, increasingly becoming a heavily contested field; among other factors, the acknowledgment of climate change and the impossibility to reduce citizens to mere consumers confront its core values from different directions. Decades of urban design practices centered on the creation of profit while smoothing the edges of the transformation processes (simulacra of communities or bits of participation, green-washing or pink-washing...) left a tangible void in the professional knowledge which is necessary to understand and build the city as a collective endeavor. No more architecture of the city. Culture has to regain centrality, opposing the idea of the city as a homogeneous flat terrain totally at disposal of capitalistic forces to endlessly re-play the same game. A consistent yet multifaceted literature on the city and urbanism needs to be reintroduced into the discourse, beyond the vulgate about cost of mortgages, positional value or working capital cycle. For the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2019, we propose the Altar of the Seven Books, a model prototype of a possible public space for the city, in the tradition of the Korean garden pavilions with their impressive roofing structures, where all of the design intensity is typically accumulated (obsessive use of iterative structural parts, colorful decoration extensively applied to the timber members). The Altar is an archaic heptagonal architecture, supported by a scaffolding frame clad by colorful portions of floor carpet. It is crowned by 49 fluorescent tubes and rises from a base made by pedestrian plastic flycurtains. Visitors need to bend in order to enter the calm inner space, whose floor is constituted by a circular long hair carpet. An off-center low altar sports seven architecture books of the city, as a personal offer of collective knowledge to the construction of post-capitalistic urbanity.