Innehållsförteckning för November 2021 från Space

The Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021 opened on Sep. 16 under the theme of ‘CROSSROADS, Building the Resilient City’. The Biennale was planned to address the resilience of cities in their responses to various crises and to posit the city of the future. General director Dominique Perrault (principal, Dominique Perrault Architecture) explained the biennale’s intentions, stating, ‘To build a strong and flexible city system that can respond to a global pandemic, mutual exchange of various expertise and approaches is required’. The Biennale also hosts multiple sub-themed exhibitions in the Dongdaemoon Design Plaza (DDP), Seoul Hall of Urbanism & Architecture (Seoul HOUR), and Sewoon Plaza. At DDP, there is an exhibition exploring the increase in the use of infrastructure and an urban exhibition rethinking the future of the urban…

The exhibition ‘Typojanchi 2021: A Turtle and Crane’ was held from Sep. 14 to Oct. 17 at Culture Station Seoul 284. The International Typography Biennale, which celebrated its 7th anniversary this year, took the theme of ‘Typography and Life’. It intends to suggest that everything in the world repeats in creation and extinction and that letters are also within this cycle. Lee Jaemin (co-principal, studio fnt), who directed the Biennale, explained why he brought other genres, such as illustration, craft, and photography, to the typography exhibition. He said, ‘I wanted to break the boundaries of the exhibition space and accept various interpretations by reflecting the recent social trend of not rejecting others based on a matter of difference’. The exhibition consists of sections addressing ‘Prayer & Desire’, ‘Record & Declaration’,…

The International Urban Resilience Forum Seoul 2021, hosted by the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) and United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), was held via live streaming on Sep. 28. The purpose of this forum was to enhance the city's ability to respond to natural and social disasters and to ensure the rapid recovery of our environments following disaster. Oh Sehoon (Mayor, SMG) noted, ‘Since the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19), there have been growing calls for a change to our disaster response methods. We must preemptively respond to subsequent disasters’. These comments stress the importance of this event. The forum included congratulatory addresses from Mami Mizutori (special representative, UNDRR), Koh Inseok (president, Seoul Institute of Technology), Yim Geunhyeong (CEO, CityNet), and a keynote speech by Ban Kimoon (former…

Design Competition for MMCA Gwacheon Bus Shelter The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Gwacheon announced the finalist of the design competition for Bus Shelter on Sep. 24. The design competition which sought to revitalize the outdoor space of the museum was expanded this year into a long-term spatial revitalization project from a build and installation project of a temporary outdoor pavilion. The three bus stops to be designed are located between the museum and the Seoul Grand Park Station on Subway Line 4. The selected team for this competition is Diagonal Thoughts (principal, Kim Sara). The proposal was a form that layers canopies of various heights and highlights a short but enjoyable trip in the forest as its main concept. The winning design will be installed on…

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had already given a special report announcing the dangers of irreversible damage to the earth’s ecosystem if the average rise of the earth’s temperature was not curbed by 2100 to 1.5 degrees relative to the age pre-industrialisation (1850 – 1900). In the sixth report, announced on the 9th of August 2021, however, the IPCC announced that the earth’s temperature had already risen by 1.09 degrees within 2011 – 2020 and that it is now expected to reach the maximum limit of 1.5 degrees a decade sooner. They also added that this acute rise in temperature was predominately caused by human activities. Of human activities, architecture contributes heavily to the promotion of our quality of life. One might even speak of the…

Some of the materials use are considered irreplaceable in terms of the building process. Concrete, iron, and aluminium are such cases, used over a long time because of the ease of their production and construction. However, lots of carbon is emitted in the mining and manufacture of raw materials to obtain these materials and to transport them to construction sites. According to data released in 2020 by Architecture 2030, a nonprofit architectural organisation established to cope with the climate crisis, the amount of carbon emitted by concrete, iron, and aluminium accounts for about 23% of the annual carbon emissions on earth. With a growing social consensus that this fact should be taken more seriously, the number of materials that consider carbon reduction is on the rise, with performance comparable to…

Architect Mario Cucinella Architects Location Ravenna, Italy Building area 60m2 Structural engineer WASP, Milan Ingegneria Constructor WASP, Ter Costruzioni Recycled material producer Mapei, Rice House, Orange Fiber, Primat, Officine Tamborrino Furniture designer Mario Cucinella Architects Landscape architect Frassinago Year 2021 This spring, a barnacle-shaped building has opened in the city of Ravenna in Northern Italy. It is the world’s first 3D printed, technology-built earth construction, housing ‘TECLA’. The house’s name derives from the city of the same name, the setting for Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972). It reveals the architect’s desire to create a residential model that can be easily produced by imitating the image of a city in which buildings are constantly being built. Mario Cucinella Architects, who designed TECLA, is an architectural firm based in Milan and…

Carbon = Energy Many measures are being developed and implemented to reduce the amount of carbon emitted by buildings from low-carbon to carbon neutral approaches. According to statistics, architecture accounts for 23% of the total energy consumption, and 42% of all carbon emissions. And more than 70% of the emissions occur in the operation and maintenance stages. Making reference to the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the most commonly used assessment tool, provides an estimate of where and how much carbon a building generates throughout its lifetime. The measurement of carbon emissions in the operation and maintenance stages are subcategorized into cooling, heating (hot water supply), cooking, and electricity. The quantitative criterion for all subcategories is to measure energy consumption. This is the method of calculating carbon emissions for each energy…

Architecture is responsible for roughly 40% of all CO2 emissions. It is the worst climate killer with the greatest potential for cutbacks. According to the latest IPCC study global temperatures will rise by 2050 between 1.8 to 3 degrees, failing the 1.5 degree goal of the Paris Climate Accords. Now the discussion must shift from ‘how to prevent it’ to ‘how to prevent the worst and how to prepare to live with it’. In cities like London, Madrid, and Seattle, a temperature rise by 6 degrees is predicted, in New York 4 degrees, and in Seoul 3 degrees. None of these cities are prepared for this change. The developed world has a particular responsibility to take action. They caused the problem and are now trying to share the responsibility. “The…

A building of sharp triangular volume has entered Dosan-daero in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. It is the new headquarters ‘SONGEUN’ of ST International Cooperation and SongEun Art & Cultural Foundation. Even before opening, it has received tremendous attention as the first-ever project that Herzog & de Meuron (co-principals, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron) present in Korea. Celebrating the opening of the new headquarters, the opening exhibition ‘Herzog & de Meuron. Exploring SongEun Art Space. An Exhibition and Collaboration.’ has been on show since Sep. 30. Through the use of various mediums such as sketches, drawings, photographs, videos, and virtual reality technology, the exhibition presents a detailed account of the four-and-a-half-year-long course, from the initiation of designing in Mar. 2017, the beginning of construction in Oct. 2018, to the completion of construction in…

The exhibition, 'Percent for Art Document: TODAY’S WEATHER' was on display at factory2 and Project Space Mak from Sep. 24 to Oct. 17. This exhibition explores the processes and records that lay behind the public art project ‘TODAY’s WEATHER’, which was designed by TAEYOUNG and Team Factory in collaboration with participating artists as a project instigated by the large-scale complex U Planet located at Gwangmyeong-si, Gyeonggi-do. The exhibition thematised ‘today’ as contemporaneity and ‘weather’ as an absolute universal human condition across space, time, and societal conditions. Under the theme ‘Today’s Weather’, each artwork sought to create a shared memory by sharing the experience of a place. This exhibition showcased 15 artworks that featured in the public art project ‘TODAY’S WEATHER’ installed at Gwangmyeong-si. Basing the work around questions such as…

As part of the 2021 Green Building Festival, the Carbon Neutral Policy Conference was held on Sep. 29. Hosted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) and organised by Architecture & Urban Research Institute (auri), the seminar, which was held at COEX in Samseong-dong, Seoul, was broadcast live online. Heo Hankyeol (researcher, auri), who made his presentation on the theme of climate-resilient development pathways, explained that warming is a certainty compared to projections pre-industrialisation, not only reducing greenhouse gas emissions but also adjusting to scheduled climate change. In addition, it introduced the concept of a ‘climate-elastic development path’ that would satisfy both sustainable development goals and the Paris Agreement, as well as achieve greater equality and well-being. As a way of responding to climate change using climate-elastic development…

Weirdcore A spectre is haunting the web—the spectre of liminal space. I first learned about it in a blog link posted on Twitter. The blog’s name, ‘sad vacation’; the blogger, ‘Melonpanda’. The post was a translation of an article on ‘weirdcore’ from an overseas webzine. According to the article-post, weirdcore is an online movement that uses amateur or low-quality photos and digital graphics to evoke certain emotions, such as disorientation, anxiety, alienation, and emptiness. Visually stimulated by images floating around the internet from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, weirdcore reminds us of a lost time and memory like that of a spectre returned. Most people who have seen weirdcore work experience déjà-vu, thinking that they have a memory of seeing that space or image somewhere before. But where? In…

We are used to making sharp distinctions between what we consider to be natural and artificial, for example the natural and built environments. However, a closer inspection of artificial things such as buildings reveals that they too are composed of materials that already exist in nature. What we mean by ‘artificial’ is nothing but a rearrangement of natural molecules. What we cherish as permanent and stable is under constant transformation, partly due to the needs of humans and other animals. As soon as we accept the continuum between the natural and the artificial, our outlook on the built environment changes, both as a habitat and as material resources. With respect to the former, even the densest cities and the largest buildings become extensions of the ‘natural’ environment, resulting not only…

Architect Werner Sobek, Dirk E. Hebel, Felix Heisel Location Dübendorf, Switzerland Building area 126m2 Structural engineer Merz Kley Partner Constructor Kaufmann Zimmerei und Tischlerei Building physics consultant Weber Energie und Bauphysik HVAC consultant Amstein+Walthert AG Year 2018 Client Empa Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology Kim Yeram (Kim): UMAR is a residence and office located in Switzerland. You completed this project by introducing some units from other buildings. Why did you opt for this construction method, known as ‘Urban Mining’? Frank Heinlein (Heinlein): Our experimental unit UMAR is part of the research campus NEST established by the Swiss research institution EMPA (which focuses on the testing of materials). When we were invited to design our unit, our initial discussions on the project quickly focused on one of the…

Eastablishing the Certification System and an Eco-friendly Architecture Industry According to ‘The 2020 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction’ by the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC), building-related emissions account for 38% of the total carbon emissions, of which 28% are emitted during the operation stage and 10% are emitted during the construction stage. Countries around the world are implementing various policies to manage carbon emissions in the building sector, and the certification system is at the centre of this contention. There are two main types of certification systems that manage carbon emissions of buildings internationally: the system that comprehensively evaluates various elements of a city and its architecture, which we call Eco-friendly Certification, and the Building Energy Performance Evaluation System that focuses on energy. The Korean government…

Architect ecoLogicStudio Location Corderie dell´Arsenale, Venice, Italy (The Venice Biennale 2021) Exhibition period May 22 – Nov. 21, 2021 Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, the founders of ecoLogicStudio, and their research partners, The Synthetic Landscape Lab at Innsbruck University and the Urban Morphogenesis Lab at the Bartlett UCL, have been invited to participate in ‘As New Households’ section, at the Venice Biennale 2021. Housed within the section of the Corderie dell’Arsenale, the studio will present BIT.BIO.BOT—a 1:1 scale installation and immersive experiment on the domestic cultivation of the urban microbiome. The installation is an urban laboratory that combines advanced architecture with microbiology to build an artificial habitat, managed by a collection of systems which enable the cultivation of microalgae in the urban realm. The advanced architectural system on show at…

In October 2021, I visited a demolition construction site in Seoul. A two-floor brick house built in the 1980s was demolished to make way for a five-floor reinforced concreted neighbourhood living facility. An excavator with a claw-shaped crushing bucket known as ‘crusher’ attached to its arm pressed down the roof, toppled the wall, and pulled down the barebone structure in a gentle gesture. A water sprinkler was used to manage the dust cloud and a 2.5-ton truck was brought in to carry away the waste. It took less than a week to remove all traces of a building that had remained in place for almost half a century. A representative from the waste processing company that I met at the site noted that about 3.5 – 5m3 of waste is…

Architect KieranTimberlake (Stephen Kieran, James Timberlake) Location Taylors Island, Maryland, United States Programme single house Building area 204m2 Fabrication & assembly Bensonwood Homes Construction manager Arena Program Management Structural engineer CVM Structural Engineers MEP engineer Bruce Brooks & Associates Civil engineer Lane Engineering Geotechnical Engineer John D. Hynes & Associates, Inc. Interior designer Marguerite Rodgers, Ltd. Landscape architect Barbara Seymour Landscapes Structure aluminum framing, stainless steel rod assemblies Exterior finishing fiber cement board, acrylic sheet, wood, aluminum, metal Interior finishing metal, tile, wood Year 2006 How can we transform the way we make architecture in a holistic sense, compressing the construction timespan and making use of technology to create a truly sustainable, aesthetically moving shelter? Most houses are built from thousands of parts, which are transported separately to the construction…

HANOK Culture EXPO 2021, the showroom for the latest trends in hanok culture, will be on show at Gyeongju Hwabaek International Convention Center (HICO) from Nov. 12 ‒ 14. This expo is hosted by Gyeongsangbuk-do and Gyeongju-si, and organised by HICO. This year's event has been designed to attract individual customers, breaking out from the professional exhibition model targeting corporate clients. It is an attempt to revitalise the demand for the hanok, especially of residential hanok by expanding the range of its viewers. Under the theme of ‘Hanok, Connector of Space’, the expo deals with not only with architecture but also lifestyles suited for the life lived in traditional Korean housing. Covering various design areas from hanok architecture and the remodeling of interiors and traditional craft, the venue will run…

Nine specialist teams from across various fields express their perspectives, stories and interpretations of the garden here and there in Deoksugung Palace. Kwon Hyewon’s How to Imagine a Tree (2021) is displayed in Hanggak. ‘Only the garden and nothing else that concerns those who tended it’, said she, imagining the five gardeners who tended the gardens in Deoksugung Palace. They are composed of not only humans, but also birds and some unidentified non-human beings. Jinnie Seo’s One Step Wander, One Step Pause, One Step Wonder (2020 ‒ 2021) is placed in front of Junghwajeon. A copper cube hangs on a pole reminiscent of the magnificent pillar of Seokjojeon in front and the lost colonnade of Junghwajeon Hall. It sounds like a wind chime when wind blows, and casts grid-like shadows…

A terrazzo stool which that looks as if a chunk of meat has been placed on top of it, a glass table that appears to melt onto a steel bench engraved with expedition tools and maps, and a shop that presents you with furniture when you purchase a printed book of furniture drawings and photographs. All of these intriguing works prompt our natural curiosity, and act as the backdrops to the three brand shops launched by ‘OH DEAR Co.’ ohdear, a creative collective of designers, have made their presence known to their the public through the exhibition ‘ohdear weekend’, which was on show last year in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi-do and Myeong-dong, Seoul. Displaying and selling the work of distinctive designers, this exhibition not only captured visitors’ attention in gathering young emerging…

On Oct. 10, architect Won Jeongsu passed away at the age of 87. It has been 19 days since his wife and fellow architect Chi Soon (advisor, Gansam Co., Ltd.) passed away. After graduating in 1957 from the Department of Architecture at Seoul National University (SNU), Won Jeongsu served as an Air Force commissioned officer and experienced base architectural design. He gained practical experience in Trans Asian Consulting and Muae Architecture after his military service, and worked as a professor of architecture at Inha University from 1963. Chi Soon began working at Gujosa Technical Institute Associates Inc. and gained practical experience at Korea National Housing Corporation, the predecessor of Korea Land and Housing Corporation, for ten years. Later on, she widened her knowledge in housing reconstruction and apartment planning. As…

Kim Yeram (Kim): The required excavation process for building structure stabilisation and for the creation of underground space produces large quantities of carbon emissions, but its environmental pollution impact often goes unnoticed because this process is not as visible. Is there a method by which we can measure the amount of carbon emissions produced during excavation work? Tae Sungho (Tae): Most of the excavation or construction equipment such as bulldozers, excavators, and rollers use diesel as their energy source. As such, the carbon emissions produced as a result of excavation work can be calculated by measuring the amount of energy consumed by the equipment at the construction site. By multiplying the amount of energy used in the excavation work per carbon emission unit, it is possible to measure the amount…

Architect Studio Kathryn Larsen Location Nørrebro, Denmark Structural engineer Kathryn Larsen, Monika Jakaityte Constructor Gabriel Pantoja, Andrejs Mocalovs, James Birkenshaw Biomaterial producer Kathryn Larsen Supervisor Mette Marko Hansen, Anke Pasold Client KEA Campus Service Year 2018 – in progress Are there any building materials that do no harm to the environment and are advantageous to our residential life? The architect Kathryn Larsen found her answer to this question in the sea. She saw a house fronted with bundles of seaweed on Laesø island, a little off mainland Denmark, and began to study ‘seaweed architecture’. The aquatic plant that she is researching with greatest intensity is eelgrass. This perennial aquatic plant is strong enough to inhabit most of the northern hemisphere, except the polar regions, and grows in colonies in slow-flowing…

Plants and the Climate Crisis Unlike life in the natural realm which is predicated on self-resilience, the urban environment created for human convenience has become a fitting but unhealthy space that has lost its need for resilience. How can we restore this environment to one beyond human control? Buildings emit carbon throughout the processes of being erected, existing, and dying. One alternative solution to reducing carbon emissions, which is the main culprit in the climate crisis, is to restore and preserve our damaged natural world. That is, to increase the area of urban green space. As it is not easy to create green spaces in the centre of cities where land prices have already reached peak levels, the proposed method is greening using existing buildings. Starting with Germany in the…

Architect EFFEKT Location Corderie dell´Arsenale, Venice, Italy (The Venice Biennale 2021) Exhibition period May 22 – Nov. 21, 2021 At the Venice Biennale 2021, which took place under the governing theme ‘How Will We Live Together?’, the Danish architectural office EFFEKT responded to this topic through their installation work Ego to Eco. Invited to exhibit in the section focusing on communities, their work sought to explore the possibilities for the design of human communities directed by the principles of nature. EFFEKT makes manifest the questions raised by the biennale, putting voice to seven more urgent questions that we all face and introducing their recent projects as forming new alternatives. • How can buildings work like ecosystems? (‘Urban Villages’ posits a vision for livable, sustainable and affordable homes. It proposes a…

Architect Lacaton & Vassal (Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal) + Frédéric Druot Architecture (Frédéric Druot) + Christophe Hutin Architecture (Christophe Hutin) Location Bordeaux, France Programme multi-family housing Size 44,210m2 (existing) + 23,500m2 (extension) Work coordination BATSCOP Structure and system engineer SECOTRAP Ingénierie Metal structure engineer CESMA Thermic study engineer CARDONNEL Ingénierie Year 2017 Cost 28,400,000 EUR Client Aquitanis O.P.H. de la communauté Urbaine de Bordeaux (CUB) In France and all around the world, unfortunately the demolition is developing in the cities and no longer raises any trouble. It is no longer a taboo. Demolition has become a short-term solution, an easy decision as well as a mode of urban generation, even a mode of recycling. Yet demolition is irreversible. Any demolition destroys a vast quantity of information, knowledge, layers, materials and…