Seoul Exhibition (2021)

The former site of Uijeongbu was designed to display a single scenery of layered history via re-interpretation of the Joseon Dynasty’s supreme governing body that the Uijeongbu buildings once used to symbolize. 

The architect is typically thought of as a figure who has the right values and priorities, who plans well, and who makes the appearance of the city exciting and fresh. These tasks, however, too often end up limiting the possibilities of what the city might become at much deeper levels. Alternatively, the architect might reveal a wildly interesting and multiplicitous becoming already underway. We ask how architecture might become a means to open up the city to common use by its inhabitants.

Based on the structure of the content (five perspectives and two main sections), the website rebuilds the exhibition space in the virtual web space, offering a chance to navigate and experience surreal perspectives and structural borders.

The installation explores the transformation of the existing Seoul city plan based on extrapolating currently proposed or already implemented smart city technology. The specific focus of this transformation will be how digital forms of governance and perception allow us to rethink traditional boundaries within cities. These boundaries include between urban and wilderness, public and private, and the different program types within the city.

PROMISE PARK is a collective intelligence platform that unravels a city’s urban history and seeks solidarity. The park will be visualized through the form of a “pattern” that weaves history and scenery. This is an abstraction of historical landscapes or changes in topography as well as a patternization of the endless repetition and circulation of history. In particular, Seoul, a city with many stories stacked in layers, is a suitable research subject to imagine such a symbolic park.

This installation investigates a fully automated building system for housing in Seoul, based on modular timber building blocks. Just like pixels or digital bits, these building elements have no specific meaning or function, but can be assembled into an endless variety of forms.

Seoul is filled with a myriad of connected roads—driveways, sidewalks, alleyways, and well-trodden shortcuts created over a long time. Changes in mobility lead to changes in roads, and people’s sensibilities, too, become different. The user interface that co-exists or competes with the mobility continues as a collage.