Subscribe
E-Paper
 |
By Lee Kyung-hwa
The theme for this year's Venice Architecture Biennale (May 20 to Nov. 26) is "The Laboratory of the Future." Curator Lesley Lokko has tackled global issues such as decarbonization and migration, technological advances and imbalances. Architectural exhibitions and future city projects are now taking place in various cities around the world. These are being presented as blueprints to address disasters and environmental crises for the future of humanity in the present age.
One of the future city projects currently attracting the most attention is Saudi Arabia's NEOM Project. It is a postmodern ecotopian smart city plan that breaks away from the oil-centered economic structure. The plan applies alternative energy, desalination and digital science. It applies artificial intelligence and robotics, autonomous driving and vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. It also utilizes technologies such as innovative vertical farming and greenhouses, sustainable food self-sufficiency production, technology-enabled health and wellness initiatives and digital manufacturing.
NEOM, reminiscent of the future city in the film "Blade Runner," is divided into detailed projects: The Line, a low-carbon, eco-friendly linear city to be built in the desert as a residential district, Oxagon, to be built on the sea as an industrial district, and Trojena, a future resort city built on the highest mountain range as a tourist district.
This is the crux of why architectural exhibitions are important: They are committed to experimentation and diversified imagination beyond the limits of current physical spaces. When such interventions unfold freely, positive possibilities for our future are opened. The videos, images and installations of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale ― one such iconic platform for architectural exhibitions ― were comprised of more conceptual work than physical representation of the buildings of the future, connecting a spectrum of ideas surrounding architecture to the problems facing the world today. Ultimately, it's more about questions than conclusions, methods than results and concepts than buildings.
From this perspective, the Korean Pavilion, which presented the national pavilion exhibition at this year's biennale, proposed a virtual space called Sibichon, a future community. Curated by Kyong Park and Soik Jung, the theme of Sibichon is "2086: Together how?" Composed of site-specific projects in Korea preparing for a time of decline and depopulation and environmental crisis as central concepts, the exhibition includes the visitor-participation game "Together How." Participating artists Suh Yehre and Min WoonGi, Hwang Na-hyun + David Eugene Moon (N H D M), and Kim Wol-sik, and Yerin Kang + Lee Chi-hoon, Jaekyung Jung presented "'Ruin as future, future as ruin,' 'Destructive Creation,' 'mobility and migration."'
Philosopher Frederic James talks about the concept of junk space in relation to current crises and disasters in his book "Future City." Referencing the concept introduced by master of architecture Rem Koolhaas, James writes, "Junk-space is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales... If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built product of modernization is not modern architecture but junk-space. "The compartmentalization of cities, the destruction of communities and urban centers, and have given birth to a new kind of space in the contemporary society we live in which can be called junk-space. The emergence of this type of space raises questions for human psychology and reality itself, implications for the unpredictable future we face.
Urban cities are fascinating objects of diversity, instability, heterogeneity, dynamism and complexity due to their density and chaos. They are objects of uncertainty that are so large and complex that they cannot be grasped in their entirety. We, who live in such places, find ourselves in an unpredictable era where conventional approaches to various phenomena no longer apply.
Unlike the traditional concept of a city that has been shaped by human history, there are such experiments as NEOM City, a mega future city attempting to reproduce nature through advanced artificial way. As well as virtual village cities such as Sibichon, which incorporates the causes and perception of destruction as a central concept, and the instant city Burning Man, which is built in the Nevada desert for a short period of time and then disappears.
It is important to have exhibitions that embrace these various elements and showcase experimental thinking in an uncertain contemporary context. In essence, such architectural exhibitions function as the brains of experiments that will drive the bodies of entire cities. This empowers us to take a multi-faceted view of the future so that we can design plans to deal with ongoing events and crises.
In Korea, exhibitions such as the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, and KIA Convention & Exhibition by the Korean Institute of Architects (KIA) are held every fall. In the future, it would be of tremendous value for these international architectural exhibitions to be structured more freely, openly and creatively, giving rise to the engaging, active dynamic of a chemical reaction in a laboratory. In the context of these venues, art, science and architecture could organically converge, eschewing rigidity in favor of inspiration and invention.
Traditional art exhibitions tend to focus on finished elements and objects. But architectural exhibitions are predominantly about the open-ended process, not the final result, as like living organisms, buildings and cities are never finished. The role of the exhibition then is to be a "subject of change," to influence the viewer, to organically interact with our lives, to melt into the city and to reflect the city as a whole. Ideally, international exhibitions such as the Venice Architecture Biennale will become equally and even more active throughout Korea.
The future directions of art, architecture and the city are profoundly ― and promisingly ― intertwined. By allowing ourselves to combine historical approaches with radical imagination, tradition with invention and an understanding of the past with unrestricted visions for the future, we will be free to discover what is possible.
Lee Kyung-hwa (khl@namjunepaikcfoundation.org), a graduate of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, is the international director of the Nam June Paik Cultural Foundation.
