Seoul Unfolded

6 Aug-26 Sep 2020

Overview

We rethink Seoul, concerning how to live together in the current context of the city where extreme conditions, driven by political, social and economic forces, become normal, forcing residents to live one or the other way and to accept only the values fallen into a rut. We believe 'Humanity, Nature and Space' are the values that were most neglected, forgotten or lost in this process, and aim to reclaim them through 'Sociopolitical Architecture, Territorial Nature, and Spatial Infrastructure. This exhibition presents works of students and faculty in the Department of Architecture of K-ARTS from 2015 to 2019. A key feature is a spatial arrangement in the main hall where one axis is for the Seoul map and the other is for agendas that are dealt with in the design studios, generating the coordinates for perspectives of the portfolios and related publications. It allows a systematic way to observe the multiple layers of how Seoul has been explored, investigated, and proposed in the design studios with unique agendas. It reveals the sites that have been persistently looked into by different studios with varying approaches. It connects some sites, which have been regarded to be completely unrelated, like a constellation of propositions under a specific agenda. Depending on the agendas that guests choose to follow, the same sites are understood differently. All these multiple readings will create a pleasurable experience of discovering hidden or untold parts of Seoul in relation to the agendas. Media and structure studies are individual students’ works and are to be exhibited as a collective pattern according to the characteristics of media, the scale of objects, and changing complexity. The way they are exhibited carefully responds to the two corridor windows respectively, keeping the space between them occupied by the papers from the thesis seminar. At opposite ends of the corridor are two corner rooms that offer an overview of the publications of K-ARTS and the Department of Architecture. The last part of the exhibition is the showcase of 13 faculty members’ practice and research works.