Indice dei contenuti per January 2018 in Space

The problem of the declining population in Korea, due to the low birth rate and aging population, is a deep-rooted problem that effects not only society, culture, and the economy, but also broader aspects of the city and architecture. Facing such a full-blown and urgent social phenomena, how are architects and architecture reacting and adapting? The exhibition ‘NEXT-TOPIA’, which has been organised by the Junglim Foundation and is being held at the Onground Gallery, begins from the question ‘A town with no children, a disappearing region, a neighbourhood of people with no future, a city filled with people living alone—what would their houses look like?’ The six teams of architects that are participating in this exhibition have proceeded with their respective ways of understanding these phenomena and illustrating this with…

A forum held to contemplate the future changes faced by art and artists as a result of further technological development was held at Seoul City Hall on Dec. 14. Under the theme of ‘The Bounty and the Spread: Art in the New Era of Innovation’, the 9th Seoul Art Space International Symposium dealt with the role of art in the new environment to be created after the sea change introduced by the 4th industrial revolution. Park Sohyeon (professor, Seoul National University of Science and Technology) chaired the session of four presentations. Cho Junggeol (former professor, University of Toronto) said that ‘artificial intelligence cannot create art because it does not have creative reasoning abilities’ and pointed out that while artificial intelligence is optimal for processing data, the main point is that…

Michael Joo, an artist who has long explored the themes of ecology and ‘circulation’, while also ensuring that the narratives in his work remain implicit, is currently holding a solo exhibition ‘Single Breath Transfer’ at the Kukje Gallery. Considering that in his previous exhibition ten years ago at the Rodin Gallery featured a work showcasing his own urine, this exhibit marks a more toned-down approach. Let’s consider his 7 Sins, displayed on the first floor of hall K2. It shows the energy consumption level for committing the seven deadly sins mentioned in the Bible: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. After setting an arbitrary number of calories burned by the body, he recorded the numbers by 0.001 second divisions. Unfortunately, the number is too small to read, such…

Located on the shoreside of the waterfront in Songdo, the Incheon Arts Center Concert Hall is built on a total area of 37,057m2 . Theis newly built city on reclaimed land consists of a large number of office towers, apartment buildings, stores, schools, and hospitals. The Incheon Arts Center Concert Hall is the sole cultural landmark in the city, and is positioned at a striking location at which the city and nature coexist. With world-class sound design, the building includes of 1,759-seats in a concert hall created exclusively for classical music and a 500-seat multi-purpose theatre for small-scale performances. To raise the acoustic and visual intimacy, the seating layout of the concert hall is in the shape of a vineyard. To provide these spaces, the vision and objective for this…

Does it sound outdated to talk of the times in which we would gather our pocket money and drop by the bookstore next to school, to buy study-aids and Junior? Many years have passed since that place of childhood memories, and the village bookstore has started to gradually fade from our daily lives. A quick look around confirms that today, as only the mega-bookstore remains with us. That said, in recent days we have seen a surge in the number of small and stylish independent bookstores that catch the eye. Independent bookstores have worked hard to discern selective tastes and genres from a multitude of books, by hosting events, allowing people to gather in bookshops to read books while drinking tea, or even beer, and encouraging the formation of new…

Park Gyehyun (Park): The bookstore is interesting in terms of its site, as it is located within a hotel. What were your intentions in providing bookstore services to hotel guests? Lee Mankyu (Lee): Eternal Journey is a core space for revealing the identity of the Ananti Cove, as a place that provides a lifestyle, rather than as a space for a night’s stay. The space has been designed to motivate guests to discover their lifestyle preferences, whether they might be forgotten or newly discovered, through the medium of books. The bookshelves with voids, the display revealing book covers, the categorization of 55 small and large themes along the lines of notable figures, the sea, the environment, the exclusion of newly released books: all of these elements were put into place…

Architect: Ateliers Jean Nouvel Partner architect: Hala WARDÉ (HW architecture) Location: Unnamed Road, Abou Dabi, Émirats arabes unis Programme: permanent exhibition galleries, temporary exhibition galleries, children’s museum, auditorium, storage, conservation building, restoration workshops, public spaces, administration building, restaurant, café, boutique Site area: 97,000m² Museum buildings: Total – 55 individual buildings / Permanent galleries – 26 individual buildings All gallery spaces: 8,600m² Permanent galleries: 6,400m² Exhibitions: 2,000m² Children’s museum: 200m² Auditorium: 420m² / 250 seats Exterior finishing: 3,900 panels (20m² average format) made of ultra-high performance fibre concrete (UHPC). Artistic commissions: Giuseppe PENONE, Jenny HOLZER Project leader: Architecture&Interior design&Museography – Jean-François BOURDET, Anna UGOLINI / Design – Sabrina LETOURNEUR, Frédéric IMBERT / Construction – Damien FARAUT, Athina FARAUT Senior architects: Rolando RODRIGUEZ-LEAL, Mireia SALA FONT, Anne TRABAND, Michal TREDER, Natalia WRZASK…

Architect: Liverani-Molteni Architetti (Andrea Liverani, Enrico Molteni) + HH Architects (Han Hyeyoung) Design team: Liverani-Molteni Architetti – Lorenzo Tamberi, Mattia cavaglieri / HH Architects – Kim Shinhye, Lee Soomin Location: Seongbuk-dong, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Korea Programme: residential Site area: 772m2 Building area: 203.17m2 Gross floor area: 579.83m2 Building scope: B1, 2F Height: 10.9m Parking: 4 Building to land ratio: 26.84% Floor area ratio: 49.41% Structure: reinforced concrete Exterior finishing: brick, aluminium, concrete polishing Interior finishing: water paint, marmoleum, cement board Collaborated design: EWOO Architect INC. Structural engineer: thekujo Mechanical engineer: Jusung M.E.C. Electrical engineer: Hangil Engineering Construction: SUWOO D&C Design period: Oct. 2014 – Feb. 2016 Construction period: Mar. 2016 – Feb. 2017 Andrea Liverani and Enrico Molteni opened their office in Milan in 1999. They have taken part in around…

The earthquake that hit Pohang last November brought about a wave of confusion and fear. As significant structural damage, such as the crumbling of school walls and bent piloties could have lead to the loss of lives, the preparation of serious countermeasures is urgently required. Relevant industries are on the move. First, the Architectural Institute of Korea established a Special Investigative Committee on the Pohang Earthquake on Nov. 17 to carry out emergency safety inspections and drafted plans to establish earthquake prevention policies. The committee is spearheaded by Oh Sanghun (professor, Pusan National University), formed by a total of five earthquake specialists that are participating in on-site investigations and uploading the results of their analyses on the association’s website. Up until this point, it has been determined that the seismic…

Once you put on the VR glasses and fix your eyes on the screen, a 360-degree scenery stretches before you as if you are standing in front of a building. A location mark floats above buildings and you can move to that spot once you click that mark with the remote control in your hands. You walk around within the film, moving from location mark to location mark, and while you listen to architects and planners talking you come to understand the space. This is ‘Made in Seoul: Experiencing Juxtaposition’, a work featured at the exhibition hosted by the Young Architects Forum Korea Exhibition. How much do you understand about architecture through pictures and floor plans? This is most likely the central question posed by this exhibition. Planner Shim Youngkyu…

Regardless of its usage, an architectural building over a certain size – located within the city – carries a public characteristic. The public in this sense possesses different aspects that are broken down into context, program, or occupying agency. The same idea applies to the recent works by designcamp moonpark dmp (dmp): disparate programs such as a dormitory at the University, a sharing office, a research center and a theater, all form distinct types of public concepts based on the environment and user. This month’s frame will trace works of dmp – the firm that is building a community-based architecture through a logical thinking rather than a pedantic speech. Here are the people creating on image of the city, quietly and firmly.…

The new dormitory at Ewha Womans University is located at the northern border of the campus, near the boundary of Ansan-mountain. Positioned at the campus boundary near a low-rise residential area, the student dormitory, which houses 2,000 people, was oriented to preserve the existing green landscape and to form a residential building of an appropriately friendly scale. As a signal that the site is mountainous, ‘a stone positioned at the summit’ has become a motif for the design. This empty in-between space takes on the lives of the boarding students, and a viewing corridor has remained open in order to superimpose the adjacent urban context with the green landscape of Ansan. The initial programme planned to operate four individual residential colleges, which were re-divided into eight individual blocks. Along with…

Hanwha R&D Center is located at the Daedeok Science Town. The site is located at the centre of the industrial complex lengthening from east to west. Easily noticeable from the freeway nearby, the site is also conveniently positioned at the boundaries where it encounters nature and the city, in northerly and southerly directions. As much as its function was important, the Center was in need of a high level of security and safety. Therefore, the fronts and sides of the building required a great deal of separation and visual blockading. The integrated building, with an interconnecting ›-shaped layout, naturally creates a new physical boundary embracing southern nature. On the exterior of the building, strong imagery represents the characteristics of the research centre as created, while in the interior, each of…

Entering the concert hall BlueSquare, an enormous bookcase catches the eye on the stairways leading to the second floor. The entrance to the bookstore BookPark located on the second and third floor of BlueSquare possesses the highest bookcase in the country, rising to 24m. Appropriately named for a park surrounded by books, the internal bookcases are designed in a variety of forms, as a space for comfortably reading and purchasing books. Beginning with the bookcase at 24m, many of the books are organised so that they can see the cover of the book. Hence, passing by the bookcase, one cannot help but steal a glance across the titles, even if it is of a book from an unrelated field. With a high ratio of books from the fields of science…

Architect: nendo Location: Tenri, Nara Prefecture, Japan Programme: public space Site area: 6,000m² Construction administration: IWATAYA ARCHITECTS Meeting area interior design: KOKUYO Website and digital signage design: Nippon Design Center Irobe Design Institute Lighting plan: izumi okayasu lighting design Planting plan: studio mons Project year: 2017…

Films are the continuum of life or the ‘flow of life’. The concept ‘flow of life’, then, covers the stream of material situations and happenings with all that they intimate in terms of emotions, values, thoughts. - Siegfried Kracauer In his book Theory of Film, Kracauer notes that the advent of film enabled us to develop a holistic appreciation of fragmented experience in urban space, as they can capture the invisible and transcend the fragmented image. This quality is also useful for describing documentary works. Documentaries, more than any other, make us understand and reflect deeply on the unique world of work, the process of conflict, and the world around us, because we often try to superimpose our lived time on the running time of the documentaries, and ask fundamental…

At Seoullo7017, which has garnered high interest since opening in the summer, is a new project in response to the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games. The Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism showcased its public art project ‘Signal, Lights, Connected’ as a part of the PyeongChang Culture Olympics. Across a total of four artworks, it plans to display the image of Pyeongchang in the centre of Seoul through the meeting of lights and sound. Scattering Lights, Gliding Sounds by Kim Daum, Hasan Hujairi, and Donghoon Yi made use of Seoullo7017’s 111 poles and pots. By receiving weather information such as temperature, wind direction and speed, humidity, and other data from a machine installed at the ski jumping board of the PyeongChang Olympics, this artwork manipulates the colour or the brightness…

It has been claimed that 90 percent of the world’s big data was created in the past two years. Boosted by this growth, the field of artificial intelligence has grown in leaps and bounds. Predicting whether the near future will be a utopia or dystopia may already be futile. Art Center Nabi has showcased various activities that meld art and technology by focusing on the humanization of technology, and has hosted ‘H.E.ART BOT’ (2015), ‘Why Future Still Needs Us: AI and Humanity’ (2016), and ‘Neotopia: Data and Humanity’. The exhibit puts the brakes on the flow of the fourth industrial revolution, mired in technological developments and economic impacts, and sheds light on the flip side of technology, such as ethical issues and communal problems, through artwork. 35 data related works…

Seongsu-dong, where experimental office spaces and commercial spaces co-exist, is fostering a young and vibrant urban atmosphere. Heyground has been planned to become an alternative business facility for the ‘change makers’ who lead an optimistic conversion to this social context. It is an outcome that multiple users have built together from the initial stages of the project. During this process, a rational alternative – to share space in various ways – was suggested for start-up companies that are struggling to gain enough space individually: it is to design a ‘singular space’ with a ‘sole element’ to fulfill an ‘assembled function’. The spaces are connected by a certain hierarchy: a desk-centred work area with flexible modules based on organisation, a help desk block located at the central area, a parlour to…

Park Gyehyun (Park): YES24 is the largest internet bookstore in Korea today, and it has been rapidly increasing its number of offline second-hand bookstores. What is the significance of an offline bookstore space to an internet bookstore? What methods will the company employ to best use and enhance these spaces? Choi Sera (Choi): These bookstores are spaces we use to connect emotionally with our customers. Offline stores in the real world can be used to clearly visualise the identity and direction of YES24 to our customers, who are more familiar with ordering books online. It is especially important to propose services that will allow us to use online and offline services together as easily and conveniently as possible. Breaking away from the stereotypical image of a bookstore, we aim to…

What Kind of Books Do You Like? Independent bookstores return, where conversations such as ‘prefer a satirical one’ or ‘I'm into mystery stories’ Some enjoy reading literature, and otherss prefer design publications or magazines. It is one of the reasons we have a variety of tastes in books that there are countless kinds of books, as many as the mass and depth of the knowledge in the world. However, large bookstores, which seem to have every book from a to z, are so packed with books that they fill every corner. This prevents us from coming across something to fit our taste nor finding the books we want without online search system. Someone said that the more cases, the more difficult it is to choose. Eventually, at some point, we…

SPACE: This project outlines the master plan for a plaza located in front of Tenri Station of an area of 6,000m2 . What kind of plaza did you want to make when you asked for a public space to promote community activation? Oki Sato (Sato): We focused on realising a ‘friendly’ atmosphere, and tried to avoid, as much as possible, limiting usage of the space. We felt it was important to leave a certain proportion of the area for users to be free to decide how they could use the space. I am happy to know that the people in Tenri city are very proactive, and that they have come up with many ideas for this area, many of which we never even considered. SPACE: The form of CoFuFun is…

Shake the Scene of Fixed Classroom Although it has been 20 years since standardized design in school architecture was scrapped, most schools still have standardized classroom sizes, classroom forms that do not consider the spatial requirements of each age, and one-sided aisle planes. While change has occurred in commercial, residential, and even official spaces, focusing on good architecture and good spaces, staggeringly school architecture, which should be the most creative, has maintained the same tedious architectural form. This is the purpose of the Dream Classroom project. This is a project that hopes to remodel existing standardized school spaces into student-oriented, creative and sentimental spaces, and to set forth a new model for school space. The project is rooted in the architectural advisory system introduced by the Seoul Metropolitan Office of…

The sound of a babbling brook: this leads you to the basement where you are met by the scene of the exhibition. Partially lined with tiles on the floor, the room has CCTV, tied hands, and a transparent acrylic plate. The work, titled Confession, is located in the basement, with CCTV monitoring everything that takes place, and the title evokes a hidden story, contributing to the creation of a terrifying atmosphere. Nevertheless, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. This is part of Chinese artist Gao Lei’s solo exhibition, ‘Enzyme of the Trial’, currently on show at the ARARIO Gallery Seoul. Kim Geumyoung (Kim): You have returned after five years since your exhibition at ARARIO Gallery in 2012. This is also your second solo exhibition in Korea. You have said…