Rafael Luna | University of Technology Sydney (original) (raw)

Papers by Rafael Luna

A Language of Contemporary Architecture

Architectural Design, 2021

The Interior Architecture Theory Reader, 2018

The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and elec... more The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. ... Yung Ho Chang, MArch Professor of Architecture Department Head

Archirouter, 2021

While modernist slab-housing dominated the reconstruction of war-torned European cities, the typo... more While modernist slab-housing dominated the reconstruction of war-torned European cities, the typology was quickly associated with a welfare agenda for social housing and eventually dismissed as the preferred building stock. Yet in Seoul, due to its rapid population increase, slab-housing became the domineering typology controlling the metropolitan skyline. These were rapidly built in blocks of two-thousand units at a time, which would eventually produce mono-functional urban islands.
As Seoul transitions into the 4th industrial revolution and an aging society, the slab-housing typology will not meet the needs for future generations. Interconnectedness is needed in order to facilitate productivity and social innovation as the majority of the workforce will retire. New typologies of housing hybrids will be needed to provide services, amenities and social interaction between the different demographic groups. This essay looks at a pedagogical experiment for a housing studio to achieve such outcomes.

A COLLECTION DEDICATED TO THE 15-Minute City. CHAIRE ETI IAE PARIS SORBONNE BUSINESS SCHOOL ENTREPRENEURIAT TERRITOIRE INNOVATION, 2021

This is a short essay dedicated to issues of Chronotopia within the umbrella of the 15-minute cit... more This is a short essay dedicated to issues of Chronotopia within the umbrella of the 15-minute city. The collection is arranged by Prof. Carlos Moreno, Scientific director and co-founder of the ETI Chair (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).

Infrastructural Duality focuses on the temporal uses of infrastructural spaces as hybrid programmable environments. For a 15-minute city, the aim of this essay it to discuss the optimization of urban frameworks with services and amenities in order to produce a vibrant city.

Topos, 2020

As the project of urbanization is in a continuous process of expansion, which is polycentric in n... more As the project of urbanization is in a continuous process of expansion, which is polycentric in nature, it requires not the city as a unit of analysis, but bounded subunits that allow for an organized flexible amalgamation. One of the quintessential megacities, Seoul, offers an alternative for analyzing urban mutations through its subunits of typological land-tied islands. This peculiar formation provides a contemporary reading of the city, in an architectural sense, as a megastructure that expands with typological island plug-ins.

URBAN AI, 2020

The megapolitan condition once envisioned as a unified world city by Constantinos Doxiadis in the... more The megapolitan condition once envisioned as a unified world city by
Constantinos Doxiadis in the 1960’s has become more of a reality than a
futuristic hypothesis. The planetary urbanization involving infrastructures that cross geopolitical boundaries have eroded the concept of a distinguishable city, leaving the problem of how to manage future urbanities. As one of these quintessential expansive megalopolises, Seoul has been able to rise from a war-torn state during the middle of the 1900s to an economic and technological power by the turn of the century becoming a test bed for managing equitable space for its 20 million citizens through the "Sharing City" agenda.

IntAR Journal, 2019

A critical move occurred in the spatial relationships of our cities when the paradigm shifted fro... more A critical move occurred in the spatial relationships of our cities when the paradigm shifted from city form to city management during the 19th century. The parcelization of the city by the implementation of grid standards, allowed multiple cities to produce a management tool for taxation and property control. Popularized by the iconic projects of the Commissioners Plan of 1811, Haussmann's plan for Paris in the 1850s, and most importantly theorized and published as the “General Theory of Urbanization” by Ildefons Cerda for the expansion of Barcelona. These models were repeated all over the globe as urbanization expanded. Yet the parcelization could not have foreseen the informalities of the city in the space that happens between parcels, and between buildings. Such is the case in Seoul in the district of Hongdae where the leftover space between the parcel and the building gets appropriated as an interior extension, giving rise to a whole neighborhood economy of illegal marketable space. These spaces are used as shops, restaurants, galleries, sometimes by morphing the typology to a minimum dimension that can fit within a range of one to three meters of width as an extension of the ground level. This essay will review how the in-between space has not only been able to produce an interesting neighborhood condition but a variety of interior spaces that have adapted to maximize the residual spaces of parcels.

MONU, 2019

In a hyper-connected city like Seoul, the age of Data and “Smart” infrastructure has revealed a p... more In a hyper-connected city like Seoul, the age of Data and “Smart” infrastructure has revealed a paradoxical state of Seoul becoming a shrinking city as well as an expanding urbanity. Based on the statistics calculated by KOSIS (Korean Statistics Information Services), the population of Seoul is likely to peak by 2030 due to the low mortality among senior citizens, low fertility rate, and increasing land prices that are pushing the urban expansion towards the fringe areas. Korea’s population over the age of 65 currently accounts for 14.3% of the total population, which is likely to increase to 25% by the time the population peaks. By 2060, the population over the age of 65 will makeup over forty percent of the total population. This paradoxical condition is then likely to transform the cityscape of Seoul into pockets of urban voids, possibly deteriorating its urban efficiency for an elder population that will dominate the territory if unexplored. This scenario, although speculative, allows for the possibility to investigate what Antoine Picon contested in his book on Smart Cities, as the lack of integration between the new layer of smart infrastructure and the potential it has for urban transformations and customization of the urban experience. Despite data infrastructures being developed for some decades now, the conception of the contemporary city has not changed much since the vision of the modernist city of the twentieth century due to the path dependency of the already laid infrastructural networks. Yet, with the receding urban cores, dispersing densities, and aging population, the new layers of smart infrastructures have the opportunity to produce a mass customization of space geared to the late life prosperity of its senior residents. This essay will explore typological prototypes that may arise from a vision of appropriating potential urban voids in Seoul as new commons for the late life occupancy. These will be contested spaces between developable new real estate, new commons as new open space is available in the dense fabric, and production spaces for the elder as employment and productivity will become an even more vital role for maintaining a healthy economy as forty percent of the population becomes eligible to retire and therefore unproductive in the traditional sense. With the possibility of new layers of infrastructure that offer adaptability become more real, an elder population can thrive parallel to the evolution of the iminent “smart” and customizable urbanity.

Inner Magazine, 2018

Interior Urbanism is an emerging field of study that explores the interior space as an abstractio... more Interior Urbanism is an emerging field of study that explores the interior space as an abstraction of the city. This can be understood in three ways, first, as using urban design strategies for interior organization of circulation (streets) and space (buildings), second, as a way to create an environment of the city within the building through an urban programming microcosm, “a city within a city;” lastly, as a way of understanding the interior space as an infrastructural extension. In order to explore the role of interior architecture in the contemporary city it is necessary to understand extrovert building strategies that come from the third definition of interior urbanism. The first two strategies describe introvert conditions, where buildings act as autonomous entities in the city. The third definition derives from the response to the pressure of an increasing urbanity, and in this paper I will explore the condition as a way of exploring how this strategy can lead to a more infrastructural way of understanding and talking about the interior space showing existing examples from high density cities like Seoul.

STUDIO Magazine, 2019

There is no escaping the inevitability of pop-culture in daily life. Through a bombardment of mar... more There is no escaping the inevitability of pop-culture in daily life. Through a bombardment of marketing campaigns, pop is assimilated, enjoyed, and revered by the masses. It is a repeatable uniqueness produced by the tools of mass production, yet it is also customizable. Just like Pop-music has been able to produce the majority of its top hits with the same four chord progression (1,4,5,6), architecture has been able to produce its own pop-chitecture through repetitive strategies. In this essay, pop in architecture will refer to those buildings made to appease the masses, that disguise themselves as a novelty only to reveal the same design progression. Pop has therefore become the repeatable model that constitutes most of our urban fabric. Pop is the new norm, and only through disrobing it, can we produce new works that give order to an ever growing chaotic urban concert through the anti-pop typology. Buildings like the Dongdaemun Design Plaza by Zaha Hadid in Seoul, Taichung Opera House by Toyo Ito in Taiwan, Torre Agbar by Jean Nouvel in Barcelona, stand out not because they are Pop, but because their unique critical language represents a new Anti-pop movement.

Teaching Documents by Rafael Luna

Seoul Biennale Global Studios, 2019

Based on the statistics calculated by KOSIS (Korean Statistics Information Services), the populat... more Based on the statistics calculated by KOSIS (Korean Statistics Information Services), the population of Seoul is likely to peak by 2030 due to the low mortality among senior citizens, low fertility rate, and increasing land prices that are pushing the urban expansion towards the fringe areas. Korea's population over the age of 65 currently accounts for 14.3% of the total population, which is likely to increase to 25% by the time the population peaks. By 2060, the population over the age of 65 will make up over forty percent of the total population. The existing paradoxical condition of Seoul becoming a Shrinking City as well as an expanding urbanity is then likely to transform the cityscape into pockets of urban voids, possibly deteriorating its urban efficiency for an elder population that will dominate the territory if unexplored. The studio focuses on this eminent future by investigating potential urban transformation and typologies that can respond to the current condition and evolve with the drastic demographic change that will occur in the coming decades. Students focus on architecture becoming a background setting for a hyper digitalized society for single people, including elder as well as the young population. The site selected is specific to the aging urbanity. The studio focuses on a city block with buildings over the age of 60 that have remained from the postwar era and are doomed to be replaced by larger development. The work presented represents a transformation of one of these aging blocks for typologies for cohabitation and production within the city.

Books by Rafael Luna

Seoul: Of Islands and Megastructures, 2024

This book focuses on understanding how a megacity like Seoul can be read as a formal architectura... more This book focuses on understanding how a megacity like Seoul can be read as a
formal architectural composition and not an endless urban sprawl.
In a broader sense, the book discusses the dichotomy between city and urbanization: “city” being an architectural problem of bounded forms, while “urbanism” is an infrastructural project of expansion. It is an uncontested reality that urbanization is a continuous global process that has produced nebulous conurbations labelled as megacities. These expand beyond the virtual administrative boundary of any said “city,” producing a discrepancy between an area of administrative control and the real physical condition of human settlement. If there were a better formal understanding of megacities through their typological architectural conditions, then there could be a better assessment of the qualitative state of urbanization. Avant-garde groups from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s such as Team X, the Situationist, the Structuralist, and the Metabolist worked with ideas of megaforms and megastructures to address this issue. Although most of these proposals remained as paper architecture, this book reevaluates some of these ideas for the 21st-century megacity, using Seoul as a case study due to its clear typological
formations produced over its different periods of governance. The aim is to present the concept for an infra-architectural hybrid model of typological islands and subterranean megastructure that organizes Seoul as a flexible multi-linear city. This book will be of interest to academics and students of architecture, urban geography and Asian studies.