Seoul: Of Islands and Megastructures (original) (raw)
Related papers
PROJECTS FOR SEOUL. Designing the megacity
PROJECTS FOR SEOUL (F. De Matteis, L. Reale), 2019
Seoul, the sprawling capital of the Republic of Korea, is a vibrant megacity with a metropolitan area exceeding a population of 25 million inhabitants, among the largest of the world. It is not only South Korea’s prime urban center: it has also evolved to become a global hub, with thriving culture and economy, multinational companies and top-ranked universities. As the city has expan-ded well beyond the historic center, its ancient core still represents a crucial space of identity for its citizens and for the Nation as a whole.Over the past three decades, after the landmark 1988 Olympic Games that heralded the arrival of democracy and the country’s rise on the international scenario, Seoul has engaged with many major renovation plans that have radically transformed its urban landscape. Architectural design has played a central role in promoting a new dimension of urban quality, necessary require-ment to place the city on the global map.This book documents a decade of research and design work carried out on several important sites in Seoul’s central core. Through architectural competi-tions, master theses, design workshops and investigations of some of the city’s most relevant projects, the authors provide insight into the practices of designing for a megacity.
The “a priori” form of New Urban Configurations
The main trouble for a big city - as a megalopolis - is the disintegration of the traditional Forma Urbis idea and of the urban identity. Even if in the US metropolis is characterized by exasperated serial iteration, made in this way in just 3 centuries, is still possible to recognize the necessary relationship between different territory parts and it’s still clear the dialectic between buildings and countryside, between downtown and periphery, between housing and production area. While in new realities everything is uncontrolled and often reduced to shapeless heap of built up. The concentration of millions of inhabitants, as a result of an extreme process of urbanization producing an amplified confusion of urban spaces, is causing a new and unexpected level of use the area and the downfall of every social equilibrium. This kind of places are ruled by the indifference of the whole hierarchy built and lack an order well-balanced between housing, Tertiary’s sector areas, commercial areas, production areas in all urban space scales possible, as is made in the best tradition of the city (in metropolis too). This space is assuming the paradoxical “a priori shape” aspect and seems in lot of its parts equivalent and homogeneous. New icons of representation, the so-called “containers”, are accidentally put into the city, as effort to ri-polarize it. These are complex urban situations and architectures that seem to evocate today the fast dynamism condition, typical in the new millennium, showing ephemeral dimension and communicate the idea of transparency, lightly and movement. The courses “Typological and Morphological Characters of Architecture ” and “Architectural Design”, in the Department dICAR, Polytechnic in Bari, left to the writer, are focused on the research on the evolutionary process that recalls, generally, the urban complexity and also to spread the necessary knowledge to understanding urban development. Moreover the ways that urban organism shows itself, with its contradictions, considered in a conceptual "shape", are the beginning of the planning thinking. This attitude, especially reported to the complex urban situations, express our capacity of being able to be active in our epoch, through a critical and not parasitic exercise breaking with the past but in continuity with what has been historically transmitted and inherited.
On Bigness and the Problem of Urban Form.pdf
Footprint, 2018
The term ‘bigness’ refers to large-scale, mixed-use buildings and was introduced into the architectural vocabulary by Rem Koolhaas. Contrary to Koolhaas’s focus on the ‘generic city’ and the Asian context, this essay explores the role that large-scale buildings may play in establishing a dialogue between new areas of urban expansion and the formal and typological characteristics of European cities. By looking at three designs by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in the light of the early twentieth-century debate on urban design and the skyscraper in Europe, the problem of bigness will be seen as a continuation of a discussion on urban form and type spanning more than one hundred years. Bigness will thus be seen as a tool capable of reworking and even continuing existing urban formal types, even if devoid of ideological and symbolic meaning.
The Scale of Urban: World Urbanisation and Architectural Reactions
The chapter represents a theoretical overview of the historical and contemporary debate on urbanisation issues. It is presented in the form of a concise interpretation of the basic concepts related to urbanisation, for the purposes of the understanding and reinterpretation of (urban) sustainability. The chapter points out the critical urban theory thesis that urbanisation is a social process generated and materialised through dynamic spatial transformation that is becoming planetary. The contemporary urbanisation fundamentally changed the cities from centric formations to the new polymorphic urban tissue deeply extended in the once rural and natural environment. Therefore, the chapter is based on the presumption that the issue of urban sustainability cannot be comprehended without an understanding of emergent interconnections and dependencies between different spatial scales, urban agglomerations, and close and distant operational territories. The management of urbanisation as a large-scale process and configuration is understood as the basic drive for the creation of sustainable urban places and territories. Furthermore, the chapter follows the contemporary methodological platforms and conceptual tools for the research of the local urban conditions in the context of planetary urbanisation. It focuses on the selected emerging urbanism approaches to researching and designing the new urban tissue, as a disciplinary path to overcoming the utopian comprehensive model of planning and designing the cities.
The Good Metropolis: From Urban Formlessness to Metropolitan Architecture
The Good Metropolis, 2019
Architecture has always been engaged in a dialogue with the city--a relationship often dominated by tension. The architectural avant-garde in particular is commonly understood in its opposition to the existing metropolitan terrain (architectural form vs. urban formlessness). This book, however, unearths strands of thought in the history of 20th-century architecture that actively endorsed and productively engaged with the formless metropolis. Revisiting early experiments that question the city/architecture dichotomy, Eisenschmidt reveals how the formless metropolis has long been a prevalent force within architectural discourse. The works analyzed span almost an entire century: They range from August Endell's urban optics and Karl Scheffler's metropolitan architecture in Berlin, through Reyner Banham's motorized vision of Los Angeles and Situationist performances in Paris, to OMA's city architectures and Bernard Tschumi's cinematic urbanisms. The author constructs new narratives that reposition architecture vis-à-vis the city, by exposing hidden histories. He uncovers architecture's continuing interest in the formless city and elucidates our current fascination with and anxiety about ongoing urbanization, revealing the "good metropolis" that was there all along. Reviews: "The Good Metropolis brilliantly explains how the formless, unpredictable, unknowable, and out-of-control metropolitan condition--seemingly the assassin of architecture and of "the good city"--became an exhilarating resource for architecture (think of the enormously influential work of Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture, for example). Moreover, the book's deep scholarship of Berlin reinstates that city as a veritable laboratory of modernization, alongside London, Paris, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, in effect combining two long-needed studies into one." Simon Sadler, University of California Davis "Modern urban history frequently grounds the postmodern recognition of the city's indeterminate dynamism in earlier planners' failed efforts to wring rational and geometric order from the rough currents of industrialization, rapid technological change, and unprecedented demographic growth. The Good Metropolis presents an alternative trajectory: a searching determination on the part of key figures over more than a century to see in the alleged chaos of the city alien and potentially productive orders otherwise impossible to envision. In this theoretically crisp and elegantly written essay, Eisenschmidt identifies the generative tradition of urban inquiry that designers forged to come to terms with, and to learn from, a human creation beyond human comprehension: the modern city." Sandy Isenstadt, University of Delaware
ARCH1332: Architecture Asian Urbanism
pt1: Weekly architecture design study and observation. pt2: Urbanism and impact study on the restoration works of Cheonggyecheon river in South Korea. pt3: Design strategy study of Urban Tulou, a public housing project by Urbanus.
2018
ions that are too easily being ascribed the label in architecture today. Here, the diagram is understood as: problematising an always already emergent (human) subjectivity; one that is generated at the shifting intersection of the object of the human sciences and the subject of a governmental reason that cultivates the aptitude for political and moral action. Thus, we might think of the diagram as an abstracted strategic tension that operates through a plurality of media (including, but not limited to, drawings, texts, schedules, tabular arrangements, institutional settings, implemented buildings, etc.), sifting and structuring a series of potentialities for the subject in accordance with a promise of the latter’s reformation. As a socio-political machine, the