The Global Studio (2019)

BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE + HANYANG UNIVERSITY ERICA

Sharing Cities

From workshops in Seoul and London, they experienced firsthand how to work collectively and negotiate their ideas in drawings and models. Their insightful research and provocative design proposals reflect how the built environment in cities can improve social cohesion by creating new spaces and building typologies for co-living, co-working, or new infrastructures to facilitate sharing and collaboration.

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

HOT AIR: The Equatorial City and The Architectures of Aggregation

As the equatorial city’s relationship to climate and atmosphere becomes an increasingly complex interface in relation to climate change and great population growth, the studio will research the atmospheric mediums of ‘hot air situated in Ho Chi Minh City.

CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

CONDITION / REAL VILLAGES: Rethinking China’s Countryside

This design studio looks at the role of rural cultural heritage in an everexpanding urban territory. We propose this in the context of the “Collective City” theme because we believe it raises important issues about the notion of the collective. In a paradoxical way, many of the problems that face the contemporary city can be solved or exacerbated by how we address the rural.

It brings to the table, the condition of the Chinese village, which for more than thirty years has been neglected, abused and depleted of life. Today, Chinese villages are disappearing at alarming rates, 300/ day by some statistics. Without entering into quantitative research, our proposal wishes to demonstrate that rural villages offer unique opportunities for collective readings.

UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA + CARLETON UNIVERSITY + UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

Block Mutations: 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.

SEOUL NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
Urban Renovation and the Third Space

The urban artifacts of Seoul’s rapid modernization from the 1930s to the 1980s are recently coming of age. As the population of Korea shrinks for the first time in history and the policies of regeneration shift away from the economic version of progress that initially created these structures, we have to ask: How should we define preservation and renovation when applied to these inherited modern spaces from a different cultural, political, and economic context?

By recognizing the actual ‘public-private’ partnership forces that will inevitably develop our site, we will explore how seemingly generic regeneration mixed use programs such as co-working spaces, offices, food and beverage programs, cultural facilities, and hotels can be used as catalysts to generate new forms of collectivity.

HONGIK UNIVERSITY

Factory for Urban Living

As Seoul is entering into posturbanization era, it is crucial to think about how architects should address the phenomenon. The city not only is losing its population but also already has lost some of its industries. However, along with the new industrial revolution in many fields, such as micro manufacturing, artificial intelligence, or hyper connected social media, there are chances to bring in production industries back to the city. The new industries may not be of the same type as so called chimney industries, but will more likely be neo-cottage industries where individuals or a small group of people can produce. And even the concept of production may not be limited only to manufacturing industries but will be expanded d and include contents production.

The studio will address this upcoming era by proposing a new urban housing typology that includes a production function. It will be used as a catalyst to reform our city and neighborhoods. It is one of the tools of urban regeneration projects in Seoul that tackles both the growth of single households and the trend of losing population.