Taeman Kim, HAEAHN Architecture+H Architecture, Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

Two Cases of Public Architecture:
An Ancient Future / An Evolving Past
Architecture and Urbanism on a Roller Coaster of Modernization
Over the past half-century, all aspects of South Korea have gone through a roller coaster of modernization, industrialization, and democratization. The country’s architecture and urban environments are no exceptions. The first of two projects in this exhibition, MPPAT (Master Plan for the Public Administration Town), exemplifies the government’s desire for a shift of weight away from the 600-year-old capital, Seoul. The second project, the National Assembly Smart Work Center and Press Center, is situated in the National Assembly complex in Yeoido, Seoul, a site symbolic of Korea’s modern democratization.
MPPAT: An Ancient Future
In 2006, an international design competition was held for a master plan to relocate the administrative center of Korea to Sejong City, located 121km south of Seoul. The competition guidelines distilled the government’s desire for a new era of communication, transparency, and democracy. The competition-winning master plan, “Flat City, Link City, Zero City” was designed by a team led by Haeahn Architecture and H Architecture, respectively responsible for the architectural and urban design. The landscape design was the product of Balmori Associates. The master plan proposed a topography-based network of streets layered upon a modern grid of boulevards. Upon this system a 2-kilometer-long structure, housing government facilities, an elevated garden, and an open ground level would be constructed. The proposal represented a process of establishing a new architectural order while materializing an ancient future based on history and past experience.
Ten years after the groundbreaking, the environment surrounding the project is still taking shape and not without growing pains. Much of the dynamic topography that had been an integral foundation for the design process has been leveled, and the proposed openness of the facility’s ground level, which was to symbolize the new government’s transparency, has been mostly fenced off. Adjacent sites remain largely vacant. The town and its inhabitants still hope that one day the area will take on an identity that is more congruous with the civil ideologies laid out in the master plan.
National Assembly Smart Work Center and Press Center: An Evolving Past
Once used as a landing strip, Yeoido, an island along the Han river, became a new urban center with the construction of the National Assembly complex in the 1960’s. Even today the rigid, grid-based site exudes a strong sense of order reflecting the authoritarian political climate of that time. Traces of decades of sociopolitical change are surprisingly absent. Between the constraints of the site shape and the underlying subway line, Haeahn Architecture and H Architecture designed the National Assembly and Smart Work Center and Press Center as a hybrid solution, converging perceptible urban conditions of the past with invisible strata of the future. This convergence is an architectural process that is conservative yet contemporary, restrained yet dynamic: a process that aims to bring a modern evolution to the spatial legacies of Korea’s past.