Brendan Woods on the curators’ hopes and ambitions for this autumn’s event

Buildings.

The Domuimun Museum Village in Seoul, which opened in 2017 and comprises an open-air exhibit of traditional Korean buildings from te twentieth century, hosts events during the city’s biennale (ph: Kyungsub Shin Studio)

Words
Brendan Woods

Photos
Kyungsub Shin Studio

Francisco Sanin, co-director of the 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture & Urbanism (7th September-10th November), recently previewed the event at Syracuse University’s London premises. Sanin admitted that its theme, ‘The Collective City’, was a bit “boy-scout” inasmuch as cities are inherently collective, but he cited Heidegger’s assertion that hammers are invisible until they break, suggesting that the forces of unequal wealth distribution seemed to render the contemporary city more divided and therefore less collective. The intention of the Seoul Biennale, Sanin continued, was to collect examples of strategies and projects that aim to reclaim the city as a “collective artifact”, and to question the role of architecture in this. He stressed that, unlike such media events as the Venice Biennale, Seoul would be truly global, with contributions from Africa, Latin America, India and other hitherto neglected countries that tend not to be given an equal platform. In addition, he hoped that Seoul should be seen not just an event but the beginning of an ongoing research project.

Co-curators Francisco Sanin and Jae Yong Lim

Sanin’s co-director Jae Yong Lim described the rapid urbanisation taking place in South Korea as being characterised by differing tendencies – Fast-Track City, Platform City and a City of Dérive – places, he hoped, where the pleasures of the unexpected might be found where relentless modernisation had previously ruled.

Patti Anahory from Cape Verde described the work of disparate groups in Africa engaged in “errant praxis”– attempts through radical intervention to create “paradigm shifts”. She cited AMP in Accra, Cave Bureau in Nairobi and a Luanda-based office called Beyond Entropy Africa. AMP, for instance, has introduced market stalls and small-scale manufacture on the site of a huge waste dump by way of developing a more active reuse of the precious metals and micro-components from abandoned electronic devices.

Ampetheatre

Perhaps the most chilling definition of the collective city was Sam Jacoby’s description of the ‘collectivisation’ policies inaugurated in China in the 1950s, where western notions of freely-used public spaces were replaced by collective spaces defined by an activity, and where urban planning was viewed as part of the technology of government. The force of the argument was irrefutable – that the dialectic of community versus association (‘Gemeinschaft’ vs ‘Gesellschaft’) that might have exercised the philosophers of the Enlightenment and thinkers throughout the twentieth century was not in any way consistent with how the Chinese Communist Party saw the development of cities. I look forward to reading his thesis in due course.

Ampetheatre

Dongdaemun Design Plaza, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects in 2014, forms a hub for art, design and technology, and also hosts biennale events (ph: Kyungsub Shin Studio)

By way of balance the concluding contribution by Peter Wilson of Bolles-Wilson – architect of Münster City Library and the Luxor Theatre complex in Rotterdam – was a delightful exposition of the pleasures of the ‘City of Dérive’, as he sees it. Illustrated by paintings and drawings from his sketchbooks, Wilson described his involvement in Korça in Albania, where the practice has been responsible for a wide range of projects including public parks, a theatre, housing and a bar perched on a lift tower, which was by way of creating a physical sense of axis in the city. His charming, almost whimsical manner suggested a total contrast to Sam Jacoby’s contribution, somewhat ironical inasmuch as Enver Hoxha, communist ruler of Albania from 1944 to 1985, had been sympathetic to Mao Zedong’s policies in the People’s Republic of China. Wilson provided a demonstration of how a city might grow without necessarily having a ‘bigger picture’, and where the pleasures of the ‘dérive’ and, dare one say, the picturesque, might be found.

The presentations concluded with an understanding that there are many contributing factors to the Collective City, with hopes that the Seoul Biennale will bring a number of them together to provoke insight and research into how the planet might survive relentless urbanisation.