Essays

• Introduction

  Eui-Sung Yi

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  In this issue, the parameters for the conservation and documentation of the city are defined through multiple lenses of economy, culture, politics and history reflecting critical and acute positions within the 2014 global hegemony. Following docomomo’s focus, this issue expands the Modern Movement legacy by advocating that the holistic understanding of architecture must include the study of urbanism. Unlike architecture, urbanism is an open-ended organism and its raison d’être is reinforced through layers of history. It is through these layers that we advocate for conservation and...

• Converging Fragments. Seoul: A Portrait of a 21st Century City

  Peter Ferreto

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  Seoul is a city of discontinuities, a sequence of fragments that collectively converge to form an urban settlement set against a dramatic natural backdrop. At the heart of Seoul’s DNA is absence, or rather the absence of any grid. Unlike its neighboring capitals – Beijing and Tokyo, Seoul is a capital whose urban fabric expands in direct symbiosis with its topography.

• Post-Global? Fantasy and Crisis during the First Decade of the Global Era

  Young Min Koo

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  “Post-global” is a coined word signifying a chaotic state or a transitional period after the violent gale of globalism that created a large gap between the new and the old. Reproving the global power game for having created evil paradises that repress individual evolutions and highest value of lives, the essay attempts to refute the historic and cultural agenda in global standard propagating them as a new paradigm that holds the key to accomplish the global mission, and to conjecture that small plans toward local community would offer guidelines to recur gradually to the state of...

• The Correlativity of Building Form and Urban Space: Swoo-Geun Kim’s Daehangno Projects in Seoul

  Inha Jung

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  Swoo-Geun Kim’s building projects in the Daehangno area of Seoul provide a remarkable example of how architects can respond to high-density environments. They also illustrate both the theoretical and the practical dimensions of the concept of correlativity, still having the potential to show us a way forward. Inspired by the urban equivalent of a traditional village structure, Kim sublimated into modern building types the fluid indeterminate spaces created by its alleyways and courtyard. This legacy is what has enabled these buildings to survive handsomely for some thirty years amid the...

• Capital Production and Social Equity: Finding Balance in Chinese Cities

  Andrew Liang

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  China’s massive capital accumulation, economic ascent and wealth production has largely been the result of their rapid urbanization effort. While it is indisputable that the country has largely succeeded in its economic reform efforts given its status as the world’s second largest economy and in that process lifted hundreds of millions of its population out of poverty, it has also, in that process, created severe social inequality and friction. This essay largely argues that Chinese cities are purpose-built financial instruments for capital accumulation, a result of the forces of...

• São Paulo: Urban Planning Efforts and Metropolitan Growth

  Renato Anelli

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  São Paulo started the 20th century as a 240 thousand inhabitant town and concluded it as a 10 million inhabitant center of a metropolitan zone of 17,8 million inhabitants. The congestion and disorder disguise the planning efforts conceived since the first decade, but only partially implemented. This article highlights some of the most important urban planning proposals as the Avenue Plan (1930), the Robert Moses’s Plano de Melhoramentos (1950), the Basic Urbanization Plan (PUB, 1969) and the last Review of the Master Plan (2013-14) to São Paulo, and the challenges resulted of the pace of...

• The “Densification” of Modern Public Housing: Hong Kong and Singapore

  Miles Glendinning

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  In the Asian mini-city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore, massive public housing programmes, far more extreme in density and height than their European and North American predecessors, have played an unexpectedly prominent role in development policy since the 1950s. This article explores some of the ways in which the original conventions of public housing were transformed and “densified” in these territories, and argues that the key influences in this process were not so much avant-garde modernist architectural discourses as the organisational mechanisms and political pressures within...

• Flexibility in the Density. Metabolism: Freedom in a Large Complex

  Souhei Imamura

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  To find multiple possibilities and to create livable spaces in an extremely dense condition – that is what Japanese contemporary architects are particularly good at. Most of Japanese architects start their career by designing small houses in an urban environment; it is a good exercise for young architects to develop their design skills. The mini site and chaotic surroundings are far from an ideal condition; in fact it is a poor environment. But the architects come to learn that from this disadvantaged condition they can do something innovative.

• PREVI: The Metabolist’s first and only built Project

  Eui-Sung Yi

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  Cities in the sky, superhighways over the seas, floating layers of techno-villages. These utopic proposals for Japan were generated by a passionate and extraordinary group of young Japanese architects fueled by the futuristic vision to rebuild their nation. Parallel to their idealism, was the path of Peter Land, an Englishman by way of Yale and South America, tasked to plan housing for the poor. Incredibly, their idealism would cross and the Metabolists’ first and only project would be for a United Nations social housing development in a place very far from Japan: Peru. Eui-Sung Yi sat...

• Rereading Our Recent Past: Notes on Chandigarh and New Gourna

  Vinayak Bharne

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  This article focuses on two iconic architectural works that dominate the ongoing intellectual discourse on conserving our recent past — the City of Chandigarh in India designed by Le Corbusier, and the Village of New Gourna in Egypt designed by Hassan Fathy. By examining the differential between their originating visions and their legacies that were shaped over more than five decades through many unforeseen circumstances and unaccounted consequences, this article provokes deeper reflections on our modern heritage and on the forces and entities that should decide its future.