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Urban Designs from South Korea: Jinhong Jeon & Yunhee Choi
May 31, 2023 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
*This talk is hybrid (in-person & remote). Capacity is limited. Please register ahead of time.
About Moving Things in the City
How can we define/expand architecture beyond buildings? Can cities sustain themselves without constantly constructing new buildings? How can we connect diverse communities in the context of constantly changing urban environments? Moving Things in the City envisions the potential growth of today’s cities and architecture through the eyes of various apparatus: personal utility vehicles (PUVs) that can be docked into hilly landscapes, urban robots that collect by-products from the manufacturing industry, and solar robots that self-assemble to become shelters. Through the eyes of these moving things, BARE has developed three projects, Docking City, Looping City, and Air of Blooms & Inhabiting Air, that create a closer relationship among things, humans, and nature.
About the Speaker
BARE―Bureau of Architecture, Research, & Environment is an architectural studio established in 2014 by Jinhong Jeon (he/him) and Yunhee Choi (she/her). The studio is committed to the exploration of architectural practice through research, with focus on the production of things with lifecycles that respond to the dynamically changing urban environment.
BARE’s works include a site-adaptable installation for Spectres of the State Avant-Garde (Korean Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018), a self-assembling shelter for Habitat One (Hyundai Motorstudio Busan, 2022), and a pneumatic AirBeam Pavilion for the Korea Aid for Respiratory Epidemics: Mobile Clinic Module (H2021). Its latest work in pneumatic structures was acquired for the permanent collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) in 2021.
BARE was awarded the 5th Arumjigi Heritage Tomorrow Prize (2015) and was a Young Architects Program finalist (2016). Jinhong and Yunhee, both graduates of the AA School, have taught at the Korea National University of Arts and acted as cocurators of the Seoul Exhibition at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2021). They are currently serving as deputy directors for the inaugural exhibitions of the Korea National Museum of Urbanism and Architecture, set to open in 2025.
About Urban Designs from South Korea: Architecture, Ecology and Communities from South Korea
This series will present various designers from South Korea, who are engaged in urban and rural regeneration projects, graphic art, video projects and other projects that are taking place in South Korea. Presenters will discuss why design is crucial in Architecture, Ecology and Communities in South Korea.
Many of the speakers in this series will be presenting their works in the Project “2086: Together How?” that will be presented in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale in Italy, opening on May 20th, 2023. Presenters include “2086: Together How?” co-curator Soik Jung (Urban Mediation Project), and exhibitors, architect Yerin Kang (Society of Architecture), graphic artist Chris Ro (founder of ADearFriend) and video artist Jaekyung Jung (founder of shhh).
Bringing together architects, community leaders and artists, this project is about how we might be working together to endure current and future environmental crises until 2086 – the year when the global population is supposed to peak. Through a participatory video game, and with photographs, drawings, models and video and architectural installations, the exhibition is designed to invite audiences to imagine an ecocultural revolution through a critical reassessment of our capitalist, globalist, and colonial history.
They will present various communities with active regeneration projects in South Korea, inside the global city of Incheon, the colonial historic center in the mid-size city of Gunsan and in the rural areas of foreign migrant workers in Gyeonggi Province. These locations constitute a cross section of urbanization, modernization, and westernization in South Korea. They will show their collaboration with the local community leaders, and their ideas and design for the future of these communities. Each community is a case study which utilizes the community leader’s deep knowledge of the place and the architect’s spatial analysis to evaluate its current state, and propose site-specific future scenarios leading up to 2086.