The projects and architectural interventions of the studio focus on the Sewoon Makercity, a strangely suspended, brutalist megastructure in Gangbuk, Seoul. They examine the potential of Sewoon as a catalyst for Gangbuk’s transition to a future, NetZero circular economy. Sewoon was originally designed as a mixed-use commercial and residential complex by the notorious Korean architect Kim Swoo-Geun in the late 1960s. Over time, a bottom-up culture has emerged, with local artisans and entrepreneurs appropriating the megastructure, and alternative markets blossoming, from electronic boutiques, to gaming parlors, porn and pirated media. The uniqueness of Sewoon has been in how it merges manufacturing, distribution, working and living, the young and the old, the official and the illicit.
In this experimental studio, we consider Sewoon as our living laboratory, as an architectural vehicle, to examine how a brutalist architectural relic of the 1960s can be revitalized and act as a catalyst for transitioning Gangbuk district into an exemplary circular economy. The circular economy promises to change the way society produces goods, how they are procured and delivered, how waste is collected and re-entered into the value chain. This new economy will inevitably be accompanied by high and low-tech automation, artificial intelligence and smart infrastructure, including electronic delivery systems and drones. Paradoxically, the new technologies, which threaten to replace the human counterparts, desire proximity to their human customers, to rapidly deliver more highly customized commodities.This desire for proximity is leading to the development of circular mass-customization and on-demand manufacturing which is cleaner and less impactful environmentally.
The work of the studio is situated between a larger scale, systems view of the flows of material and goods in the neighborhood (Gangbuk), and a precise and detailed architectural intervention into an existing building (Sewoon). Students focus on a particular material flow of their choice. From plastics, garments, plants, food, electronics, the purpose is for the combination of the different flows, from waste to product, to form the basis for the spatial and socio-ecological transformation of Gangbuk into Circular Gangbuk.