Land Form Architecture: Bridging the Narrative of Korean Urbanism

Abstract

Korea, as compact as one could imagine, is dominated by housing complexes that resemble factories of living cells. These literal house-building machines constructed through re-useable concrete formwork are endlessly repeated that one is hardly able to identify which house belongs to whom. Further, infinitely duplicated housing-machines are in the process of construction waiting to operate every day. In the absence of other architectural agendas, economical and functional efficiency is the only algorithm that defines the characteristics of apartments. Relentless homogeneity of urban fabrics generates monotonous scenery of daily life and community networks are severed by their distribution inside strictly partitioned structural frames. While the sole purpose of the housing complex is the production of more housing, in effect it imposes an ideology of extreme isolation, disconnection, and discretization by its masterplan, circulations, forms, and construction methods altogether. The question becomes how to leverage the existing socio-economic infrastructure and its architectural typologies to roduce different social and spatial outcomes. The intellectual tradition of horizontality shows us a possible for opportunities of the integration. When the typical apartment complexes are regularized stacks of living cells, horizontality would allow communal, cultural, and social programs to penetrate, stitch, and interact with the existing repeated blocks. By doing so, programmatic coherence and collision would provide new types of relationship within the larger urban landscape, and between people and the built environment. This thesis investigates on the built environment of contemporary society in Korea, and proposes a new typology driven by the idea of ‘horizontality.’ By deconstructing and re-formulating the relationship between form and program, the new prototype of Korean cultural park will suggest a new possibility of urban life in Korea.