Collective City
September 7–November 10, 2019
The 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (hereinafter Seoul Biennale) is scheduled to open this September as the main exhibition in Dongdaemun Design Plaza under the theme of Collective City.
The objective of the Seoul Biennale is to provide the public with a platform to exchange information and hold discussions on the creation and changing of cities. To that end, this event aims to redefine architecture and urbanism to align with the role of a collective city model that the public can create and reap the benefits of together. At a moment when cities are increasingly unequal and segregated it asks if they can continue to be perceived as collective spaces and what tools or strategies can be used to transform cities into collective spaces.
The Seoul Biennale will serve as a platform for sharing a wide range experiences of cities around the world through the four exhibitions, Thematic Exhibition, Cities Exhibition, Global Studios and On-site Projects.
Directors: Lim Jaeyong and Francisco Sanin
The 2019 Seoul Biennale is conducted under the direction of Lim Jaeyong and Francisco Sanin.
Lim Jaeyong is the Principal of the Office of Contemporary Architecture (OCA). As an architect, he seeks out new forms and models by assessing the social, economic, and cultural aspects of change and creating structures that capture them. For Lim, the 2019 Seoul Biennale is an extension of his work in finding a new urban structure. He has previous experience as the Commissioner of the Seoul: Towards a Meta-city exhibition, the 2011-2012 Korea-Japan Modern Architecture Exhibition, and the Seoul Tourism Exhibit at the 2011 UIA Competition. Lim graduated with a B.A. from Seoul National University and an M.A. from University of Michigan.
Francisco Sanin is an international architect and urban designer renowned for his research on the history and theories of urban form. Prof. Sanin currently teaches at Syracuse University and also taught as a visiting professor at Princeton University, the AA School, Kingston University, and Korea National University of Arts. He is currently conducting architectural design projects in Asia, Europe, and South America. He worked with commissioner Chung, Guyon in 2004 City of the Bang exhibition for Venice Biennale and he was also co-commissioner of the Korean Pavilion in2008. He was the designer of the 2011Gwangju Biennale 2011, and the curator for the Seoul City Architects Forum 2017.
Thematic Exhibition
Collective City seeks to question how modes of collective practice and action can challenge the current paradigms of city development and offer resistance to the dominant systems of spatial production. The biennale seeks to reflect on new models of co-existence, social practice, governance, research and speculation, to suggest alternative concepts of architecture, the city and the environment, to interrogate architecture’s political agency.
The Thematic Exhibition is an invitation to radically reimagine the structure of our cities, a provocation to fundamentally reprioritize, shifting focus from the success of the individual and capital through real-estate speculation and the commodification of land, to foreground collective rights and to claim the city as a shared investment.
Participants’ work ranges from critiques on the contemporary processes of urbanization, exploration of ecological and infrastructural systems and questions of material and production, to testing alternative models of development through typological innovation, new forms of tenure and landownership, architecture as a form of mediation and consultation, to expanding and defining new territories.
The curatorial project juxtapositions research and propositions from diverse scales and forms of global action, imbricating possibly dissonant epistemologies. The potential richness and legacy of the biennale is what can be revealed at the intersection of these conflated scales and practices, to unravel preconceptions within the field and proffer new ontologies as a space of proposition for new forms of existence.
Exhibition Curator: Beth Hughes
The chief curator of this exhibition is Beth Hughes, current Head of Programme for Architecture at the London Royal College of Art. Ms. Hughes graduated from University of Technology Sydney, where she later taught her students. From 2004 to 2009, she worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA — Rem Koolhaas). In 2009, she joined as a partner at Point Supreme Architects in Athens, Greece and, in 2011, established her own practice in London, which she currently manages.
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