Projective Evolutions of Five Urban Blocks

The studio examines the theme ‘Collective City’ in the scale of an urban block, not necessarily as a formal entity but as an organic/dynamic and spatial one. The plan is to have each studio study the urban ‘DNA strands’ of Seoul (spatial, formal, anecdotal, programmatic, social... fragments) and produce/compose a hybrid-projective-fictitious urban block in scale using the ‘DNA’ based on each studio’s own biases and understandings of contemporary urbanism. While recognizing the critical contributions of the idealized and formal blocks of modernists (Cerda or block/ slabs), the trans-territorial blobs, blocks, and slabs of Archigram and Team X, and the mega or super blocks of contemporary developments, the project imagines evolutive mutations/evolutions of existing narratives (perhaps more like that of Kowloon). It will generate projective imaginations, new hybrids, through augmentation and aggregation of existing conditions, and by incorporating and grafting of external/foreign elements on to the latent potentials (embodied collectivities) within the existing urban tissues/cells (informal and formal). Each studio will investigate different parts of the city, collect spatial and architectural DNA, recompose and hybridize toward a new condition, and nest them or situate them in a block scale of Seoul.