Inhoudsopgave van August 2021 - Space

The crew of Apollo 17, who looked at the earth from space, saw the earth and called it ‘The Blue Marble’. However, the global situation we experience today is not ‘blue’. The exhibition ‘Sounds of the Blue Marble: Mourning the Anthropocene’, held at the Seoul National University Museum of Art, asks us to face uncomfortable scenes from the era of the Anthropocene, which has crafted a painful history such as war, environmental pollution, climate crisis, and pandemic. Twelve participant artists of various genres, including painting, photography, sculpture, performance, and video, tried to embrace these issues concretely through their work. Kim Shinhye unfolds a natural landscape printed on the labels from bottles; Lee Soyo traces the history of domestic coloured cactus exported throughout the world through artificial breeding and crossbreeding; An…

Jo Choonman was fascinated by photography while working as a welder in his twenties, becoming a hobby but only entering Kyungil University School of Photography & Videography at the age of 40. ‘A photographer who used to be a welder at Ulsan Industrial Complex’; this single line in his profile lends authenticity to his photographs, pictures of industrial complexes and landscapes. However, his work escapes the sense of reality he has experienced as a field worker and maintains a contemplative distance. The mechanical critic Lee Youngjune praised his photographs as they offer a fresh take on the density and forms of huge industrial sites that are uncommon, defining a sharp ‘industrial aesthetics’. As proof, over the past 20 years, he has been invited to group exhibitions covering diverse themes such…

What is happiness? How much do we feel happy every day? Are emotions such as happiness, loneliness, sorrow, joy, and achievement solely at the expense of the individual or are they the product of influences from social, political, and economic environments? It is not easy to answer these questions. However, if we can come close to an answer, that is, seeking clues about where and how happiness arises and how it is related to many social conditions, our emotions can also become tools in architecture and design. ‘Our Happy Life’, examining the concepts and concerns about happiness and impact of concern for wellbeing on the built environment, opened on June 22 at Seoul Hall of Urbanism & Architecture (Seoul HOUR). This event, an international exchange exhibition with Canadian Centre for…

The Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) announced that Kang Byoung-Keun (emeritus professor, Konkuk University) is appointed as the fourth Seoul City Architect. On June 28, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon presented a letter of appointment to the new Seoul City Architect at the mayor’s office. Seoul General Architect, a private expert introduced by Seoul first in Korea in 2014, is in charge of general planning and coordination of urban architecture policy and spatial environment projects of Seoul. The architect will deal with urban architecture and space projects closely connected with the lives of its citizens from public buildings such as daycare centres and welfare facilities to parks, streets and landscaping. He graduated in architectural engineering from Konkuk University and completed his doctorate in architectural engineering at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. His…

On June 25, the Seoul Metropolitan Government selected an architect to design a new rooftop for the Seoul Hall of Urbanism & Architecture (Seoul HOUR) through a nomination contest. KHYarchitects (principal, Kim Hyoyoung), Diagonal Thoughts (co-principal, Kim Sara), Architecture of Light and Air (principal, Park Jeantaek), Studio Heech (principal, Park Heechan), and JIYO Architects (principal, Kim Sejin) participated in the contest ‘Seoul Maru Project 2021: Public Intervention’. The winning work is the ‘Seoul Urban Pinball Machine’ submitted by Studio Heech. Park Heechan considered the topography of the existing building as a game board and wanted to transform it into a space in which citizens can enjoy pinball. He also suggested that furniture and objects used in the game be made of eco-friendly materials such as recycled concrete and bioplastics. The…

Sachin Rastogi co-principal, Zero Energy Design Lab × Bang Yukyung Bang Yukyung (Bang): This project is a domitory for a university in Gurugram, a satellite city to Delhi in northern India. After completing the Boys Hostel Block in 2017, Zero Energy Design Lab (ZED Lab) also carried out design of the Girls Hostel Block. What did you focus on when you designed in this project? Sachin Rastogi (Rastogi): The primary design challenge was to create a secure hub for the girls—a campus within a campus that would fit into the urban master plan of a university campus that did not restrict movement, while establishing a connection with the outdoors. The hostel was expected to be home to approximately 130 students, with dorm rooms spread across four levels in addition to…

Punto de Inflexión Mars House S-Map Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris ZEPETO Earth 2 As the threshold for access to the digital world has been lowered, the number of people moving real space to cloud servers, creating virtual egos, and building architectures that exist only digitally has increased. This is due to the fact that immersion experience technology, which obscures the boundary between reality and virtuality, has created an environment where we can’t define the dimensions clearly. It can also be said that the technology discovered the new type of land where architecture can be built. Since when has this new ground become, and how far can it expand? To find clues to the question, SPACE looked at the virtualities inherent in architecture and the attempts to actively express them in…

Choi Eunhwa (Choi): How did you start ‘Mars House’, the first work of digital architecture to be sold on the NFT? Krista Kim (Kim): Last March, I decided to create my dream home using the latest digital technology. I envisaged one large LED floor that would stretch from the house, along the patio, to the swimming pool, demonstrating the healing qualities found in my video art. I predict houses of the future will use video walls as residential architectural installations on which to display digital art. I feel that our society needs an antidote to the relentless distraction of the digital screen and the pressure thousands of messages place on our consciousness. Light, colour and healing sound frequencies can alter our mental state. In the Mars House, I sit with…

A character resembling myself is wearing a daring outfit that I would not usually dare try on. He goes to school and saunters around the set for shooting the video. He meets other users, poses to take photos, and performs various quests. It’s what happening in ZEPETO. Launched in August 2018, ZEPETO is a social media platform based on augmented reality (AR) avatars. It is a service derived from the camera application SNOW, and it began with a function that recognises the user’s face through deep learning and converts it into a character. Thousands of aspects, including not only the face but also the skin, hair colour, and body shape, can be customised. An avatar generated in this way moves through the virtual space ‘world’. It ranges from ordinary spaces…

As community spaces in the fourth industrial revolution integrate information, culture, and technology, government offices and libraries are the main programmes in OKSUYEON. OKSUYEON’s Ambience Wall revolutionises the historical significance of Dokseodang for the contemporary moment and reinterprets the adopted form of a past culture through the language of the present. Despite its very unfavourable topographical and geographical conditions, located at the lower half of a steep cliffside incline of about 10,000 households, OKSUYEON introduces a new kind of spatial experience and architectural formative language by using the fact that the region is easily influenced by life patterns in terms of its urban context as well as an interaction architecture that is responsive to such natural and urban data parameters. By adjusting the amount of light and shadow that enters…

According to what criteria are nature and objects selected and discarded in the city? The exhibition ‘Beyond the City Lights’, currently held at the Kumho Museum of Art, tells the story of five artists who pay attention to the alienated and disappearing beings of a human-made city. Um A Long, who experiences frequent moves, focuses on humans, animals and plants that have lost their habitat and are forced to migrate. ‘Move and Move’ (2020), an installation work that prints images of people, houses, animals and plants and attaches them to steel pipe posts, metaphorically reveals the situation of these beings in that they are assembled, disassembled, and reassembled depending on the situation. Jang Yongsun, who has been working with grass and seeds weeded as part of the urban aesthetics project,…

‘BVLGARI COLORS’, which is one show at the Hangaram Design Museum and Seoul Arts Center, is an exhibition in which you can observe Bvlgari’s passion for colour and the spirit of experimentation. This exhibition, which was held in Korea as its international debut, showcases representative colourful works from the early 1930s to the present. A total of 190 pieces, including the private collection along with the Bvlgari Heritage Collection, have been released, and you can also meet interesting storytelling related to each piece through the audio guide. In particular, in this exhibition, seven domestic artists (Kim Jongwon, Noh Sangkyoon, Lee Seahyun, Yee Sookyung, Choi Jeonghwa, Vakki) participated and presented works that match the various colours of Bvlgari, enriching the theme of the exhibition more abundantly. The exhibition is divided into…

Can air be an architectural material? BARE (co-principals, Jeon Jinhong, Choi Yunhee), which has long explored new urban intervention methods for architecture through ideas developed through their research, participated in the Mobile Clinic Module (MCM) Project organised by Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) last year. Faced with our extraordinary pandemic situation, the Korea Aid for Respiratory Epidemic (KARE) initiative at KAIST developed a readily installable and easily dismantleable MCM, and requested BARE design a large-scale exterior structure that could envelop the entire hospital building. As installation speed, mobility, and patient psychology were the main priorities in this project, BARE proposed ‘AirBeam Pavilion’ with an air membrane structure. The massive large-scale space was designed by connecting unit-modular air membrane columns (airbeam) with zippers to hold hospital facilities and…

International Design Competition for the National Museum of Korean Literature The results of International Design Competition for the National Museum of Korean Literature organised by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism of Korea and Korea Institute of Architects were announced on 18 June. This competition was held with the aim of opening a multi-cultural space of 14,707m2 in scale by 2024 at Jinhwan-dong, Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul, which will collect, preserve, research, exhibit, and provide education regarding Korean literature materials. As the finalist of this competition of 53 local and foreign team participants, the co-proposal ‘Munhak Village’ designed by D&B Architecture Design Group (principal, Cho Doyeun, Lee Eunseok (professor, Kyung Hee University), and Atelier KOMA (principal, Oh Jongsang) was selected as the winner. The winning design is distinctive as it allows…

A desk tells about its user. When looking at my desk, there are many work-related items, such as a laptop, monitor, memo pad, drawings, scale, stationery on a small tray which was gifted, coloured pencils, post-it notes and so on. There are also things however that are not connected to work. These are the things that make me feel happy just by looking at and playing with them. They are like stories that I want to tell, and power my inspiration. I draw great strength just be with them, and rely on them emotionally. That is why I keep them close, and hint at unanticipated desk-mates like clients, friends, employees and partners and so on. Do I deliberately reveal my aspirations and life values in a subtle way, using them…

S-Map is a three-dimensional map built in cyberspace by replicating the entire 605.23km2 expanse of Seoul. If you access the website (smap.seoul.go.kr) via a browser, you can see a bird’s-eye view of all of Seoul. By using a mouse, you can zoom in and out on the map and also freely adjust the altitude and tilt angle. This allows you to observe the city from any location on any desired scale, from any desired angle. On the map, there are approximately 600,000 buildings, various facilities including bridges and tunnels, underground facilities for water supply and drainage, gas, electricity, communication, and heating, and ground information such as the integration of geological maps and contour maps. The information about city’s administration, buildings, and traffic can also be added or excluded from one’s view.…

What would you do if you could purchase the construction site for Hyundai Global Business Center (79,342m2 ) located in Samseong-dong in Seoul for a little more than 12 million KRW? Obviously, it sounds like nonsense in the real world. But in the virtual real estate exchange ‘Earth 2’, it is a feasible story. Modeled the exact shape of the earth, Earth 2 is a digital environment and virtual real estate platform designed by Australian developer Shane Isaac in November 2020. Here, the currency ‘E$’ is used, and users can purchase up to 750 pieces of land (tile) divided into 10 ×10m. This means that the land that can be owned by each person is approximately 75,000m2 . Land that is popular in reality also shows a high commercial value on the…

MOKYEONRI is a project that distinguishes itself from the typical wood cultural centre by reinterpreting the ‘sensual experience’ of tree in an architectural way. The constantly changing forest atmosphere is constituted by the rays of sunlight that fall through the leaves and the varying amounts of light that reach the earth in accordance with the currents of the wind, and people are introduced to the project via architectural abstraction. This was introduced in order to induce various levels of experience of wood by embodying in architecture the synaesthetic experience of forest dwelling. Through diverse situations in from the communication between the building’s interior and exterior, the Ambience Wall awakens a synaesthetic experience architecturally, and through its contemporary design interpretation of the munsal in Korean traditional architecture, it brings about a…

On May 21, a park named ʻLittle Islandʼ opened that looked like several tulips planted in the Hudson River in New York. The park located on the former 55th pier, which has long been neglected, and consists of an outdoor rest area, playground, open-air theatre and observatory. Little Island opened its door when the vaccines for Coronavirus Disease-19 are well distributed. Since then, a lot of events have been held, making it a haven for New Yorkers. David Farnsworth, Signe Nielsen, and Thomas Heatherwick, who worked on the Little Island project, talked about the process of building an artificial island on the river as a concrete rescue unit. Kim Yeram (Kim): Little Island is a reactivation project focused on New York City’s Pier 54 in the Hudson River. Can you…

The dual exhibition ‘Landscape Woven, Connected’ by architect Seung H-Sang (principal, IROJE) and the artist Choi Deokju was held between June 29 and July 18. The exhibition featured a total of about 45 artifacts consisting of wooden furniture by Seung H-Sang and linen patchwork’s by Choi Deokju. The furniture and patchworks featured in this exhibition are plain in form. Lacking in extravagant rhetoric or oratory explanation, elements are forged two-dimensionally or more to make up the whole. Both works are the fruits of ‘having a belief in form, involving careful planning and calculations, and involving a lot of labour’. In other words, it fulfills ‘connectedness’ by weaving and tying, and focuses on ‘woven’ rather than machine-making. Seung H-Sang designs furniture, noting that ‘furniture can be an instrument that approaches the…

Exhibition ‘Familiar Future: The Value of Pursuing Public Design’ has been held since June 30 at Culture Station Seoul 284. The exhibition reveals examples of public design in various cities in Korea and talks about how designing for society is close to our lives. Zerolab (co-principals, Kim Donghoon and Jang Taehoon / covered in SPACE No. 634) made the inside of Culture Station Seoul 284 look like a park, an alley, a street, a playground, the subway, and a school so that visitors can experience examples suited to each section. In the street section, the design of the heavy rain signage applied to the Cheonggyecheon Stream in Seoul and the multi-purpose parking lot created at Jungang Market in Iksan, Jeollabuk-do were introduced; Gupo 2-dong Safety Road in Busan and Sindaebang…

On June 26, the second joint academic seminar organised by the Society of Korean Modern Architecture & Urbanism and Architecture & Urban Research Institute (AURI) on ‘The Meaning and Value of Modern Industrial Heritage’ was held at the Gwangju City Hall. The seminar was moderated by Lee Kyungah (professor, Korea National University of Cultural Heritage). Kim Hana (lecturer, Seoul National University) who led the first presentation, observing the architectural features revealed in Guro Gongdan (G-valley) ‒ which accelerated economic development in Korea ‒ and classified and analysed them according to structure and scale, changes in density from extension, and the façade. Also, as a Korean factory architectural model designed for the Korea Trade Fair (1968), Kim highlighted its historical value. Nam Jeehyun (researcher, Gyeonggi Research Institute) then followed with her…

The Seoul Museum of History published a report, Jangwi-dong, Panorama of Change in Urban Housing containing the results of the ‘2020 Survey Report of Seoul Daily Life and Cultural Materials’. Jangwi-dong, Seongbuk-gu features a unique residential culture with a mixture of various housing types from the 1950s to the present. The report highlights these changes over time. Until 1950, the rural village which had strictly adhered to Jangwi (1905), their common rule, underwent rapid changes after the Korean War. From the late 1950s to the 1960s, the development of large-scale housing complexes promoted by the Korean Housing Administration (presently Korea Land and Housing Corporation) leading to the construction of Restoring Housing, Revival Housing, National Housing in sequence. Around the same time, the construction of Dongbang Housing Complex by residential land…

Berna Yazıcı, who studied the problems posed by rush hour from an ethnographic approach, analysed traffic as a ‘social condition in which urban inequality occurs’. Istanbul spans Asia and Europe with the Bosporus Strait between; there are two bridges used by a million commuters, or 10% of Istanbul’s population, every morning. Labourers are transported in truck compartments, office workers are on packed onto buses, and wealthy people drive their own cars. What was interesting was people at the extremes of class. The elite travel by helicopter or by ambulance-taxi across the city to avoid the traffic jams. An ambulance taxi is a personal ambulance owned by those in the highest class. The poor, on the other hand, just walk. Despite the city’s harsh environment, such as security issues and intense…

In October 2020, ‘Arquia/Próxima’, an annual architectural event for Portuguese and Spanish architects, was held in a virtual space instead of a real space for the first time due to the present global pandemic. With so many large-scale offline events transferred online since last year, the main difference in this event is its desired remedy to the norm in the sense of communicating liveliness, solidarity, and mutual interaction. The programme itself consisted of lectures, exhibitions, films, and awards ceremonies similar to the previous year. However, the event was not only broadcasted online through Zoom and YouTube; a new 3D virtual space was built for this two-day event. When you access the website (espaciofq.com) and enter the event venue with a thin-paper-like avatar, a city block resembling the pixel world of…

Livio de Luca is an architect and a doctor of Arts et Métiers ParisTech, HDR in computer science. He is also a research director at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He is now coordinator of the digital data working group of the CNRS scientific project and the Ministry of Culture for the restoration of Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. Kim Yeram (Kim): Researchers from various fields participated in the digital reconstruction project of Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. What points were foremost in your mind during your discussions around the process of restoring the building in cyberspace? Livio De Luca (De Luca): The disciplines related to structures, shapes and materials were of greatest relevance. First of all, it was a question of articulating the skills capable of illuminating the previous…

While architecture has transformed over the ages, the ground on which it stands seems so resolute when compared to the rapid responses displayed by other fields in regards to contemporary data. If one thinks of an architect in Korea who interacts in real time with such a constantly changing and expanding vision of data, it would be none other than Han Eunju (principal, softarchitecturelab). Through her agile approach, ever adaptating to our changing times, Han has established her own philosophy and design method to build a new architectural topography. Han created a rhythmic topography based on classified urban data and here visualises it in physical form to produce a new spatial vocabulary that reflects our current lived conditions. Within this vocabulary, the ‘Ambience Wall’ is the most representative of the…

BEYONDMUN is softarchitecturelab’s third Ambience Wall project and also its first remodeling project. After a complete removal of the trees and the main entrance staircase to the Incheon Housing and City Development Corporation built in the 1990s, softarchitecturelab reconfigured a new public space through a wide, open staircase that also resembles a stage. To match the image of a leading smart city, softarchitecturelab chose the Ambience Wall and designed it to symbolise the flow of big data. The Ambience Wall was installed outside the building to respond closely to the constant flow of people outside. By equipping it with a movement sensor, the façade moves according to the movement of people passing by the Ambience Wall and thereby provides a striking spatial experience. It is a project that maximises interaction…

As its name suggests, Le Detour, designed by architect Kwak Heesoo, is a suburban café reached by passing through multiple twists and turns. One might begin to wonder whether it will receive any visitors due to its remote location, far from the city, but upon entering the building one quickly recognises its popularity, full of people sitting around and enjoying their coffee. In this interview, we hear from Kwak Heesoo and learn more about the spatial strategy used to attract visitors to a café located on the outskirts of the city. Kim Yeram (Kim): Le Detour is located in a place that is difficult to access via public transport. How did you hope to overcome this limitation? Kwak Heesoo (Kwak): For architects, the physical environment is not something to overcome,…