Crossroads: Building the Resilient City

Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021 will open on September 16, 2021. Claiming a strong link between architecture and urban planning, the Seoul Biennale offer a platform for exchange, discovery and enhancement of projects and research that question the city of today and tomorrow. This third edition will bring together nearly 200 participants, and a hundred cities from around the world, around six exhibitions, as well as numerous events and conferences.

General Director: Dominique Perrault

In February 2020, the French architect and urban planner Dominique Perrault was appointed General Director of the third Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Praemium Imperiale award winner and honorary professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Dominique Perrault keeps up its privileged relationship with the city of Seoul, where he built Ewha Campus Complex in 2008 and is currently developing the future underground hub of the Gangnam International Transit Center. As well as his projects and research works which strongly link architecture, landscape and urban planning, Dominique Perrault wishes to mark a further step towards affirming the place of cities as privileged spaces for the development of a more sustainable world. As General Director, Dominique Perrault is also the curator of the Cities and Thematic exhibitions of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021.

The theme: “Crossroads: Building the Resilient City”

Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021, one of the first architectural events produced in the context of a pandemic that has profoundly challenged the functioning of our modern, technological civilization, and our vision of the city, strongly asserts the importance of dialogue and the creative force of interactions, as a nourishing ground for architectural design and urban planning. Placed under the sign of resilience, the Seoul Biennale will open up a thinking in action on the city of the future. Through this theme, the Seoul Biennale wishes to go beyond a standardized vision of the city, to discover its unknown areas, to read our built heritage in a new way, to highlight the innovations linked to new types of buildings or infrastructures, social relations and design processes. The concept of resilience applied to the city appears to be a necessary condition for sustainability, a process that leads to a reconnection with the environment, a new urban ideal, conceived as a complex, flexible and agile system. What kind of expertise, resources and tools do we have today to imagine resilience through architecture?

Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021 will also promote the theme of “Crossroads,” considering cities and metropolises as spaces of superposition, complex and constructed interactions between inhabitants, buildings, infrastructures, movements and regulations. The exhibitions will then offer an exploration of the world’s cities and an original vision of the production of the city, through the prism of five thematic figures, or “Crossroads”: Above X Below, Heritage X Modern, Craft X Digital, Natural X Artificial, Safe X Risk. These themes contribute to re-imagining the future of our urban environments, by tightening the links between city and nature, old and new, above and below, human and non-human.

Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021 venues

Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP)
281 Eulji-ro, Jung-gu
Seoul, South Korea

Seoul Hall of Urbanism & Architecture (Seoul HOUR)
119 Sejong-daero, Jung-gu,
Seoul, South Korea

Sewoon Plaza
159 Cheonggyecheon-ro, Jongno-gu
Seoul, South Korea

Visit the Biennale’s website for more information.