Iconic buildings and the fabric of a city

Dongdaemun Design Plaza, designed by world renowned architect Zaha Hadid, will open to the public on March 23. / Courtesy of Virgile Simon Bertran

By Lee Hee-kyung

When Seoul was designated as the World Design Capital (WDC) for 2010 by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, it inspired new debates on the aesthetics of the city’s modern landscape.

Municipal authorities — who have been promoting Seoul as a hip and happening city that deserves to be mentioned along with cool urban destinations such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore and Kula Lumpur — felt vindicated by the title.

But critics lament that Seoul is a 600-year-old metropolis that doesn’t have much to show for it aside of a few taxidermied palaces and the few patches of “hanok” (traditional houses) that survived ruthless waves of redevelopment.

This disconnection of past and present, they say, has resulted in incoherence between architecture, where ultra-modern buildings coexist with some of the least endearing works of architecture found in Asia.

Now, the debate is about to be extended with the soon-to-open Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Zaha Hadid’s ambitious project that resembles a huge, metal skull implanted over the squalor of a badly-aging commercial district.

Seoul officials believe that its new trophy architecture, which will contain of a multi-use park, a fashion plaza, an underground mall and art galleries, will be a positive addition to the city’s urban fabric.

To critics, the Dongdaemun Plaza represents everything that’s wrong with Seoul’s urban planning. To make room for the new building, city officials destroyed the Dongdaemun Baseball Stadium, which had been one of Asia’s oldest and historically significant baseball stadiums dating back to the 1920s.

Aside of Dongdaemun Plaza, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, which opened late last year near Gyeongbok Palace, is another significant addition to Seoul’s architecture.

As it was with Dongdaemun Plaza, the museum’s location was picked due to its historical significance. Unlike the case with Dongdaemun Plaza, the new museum was designed to blend with old structures rather than replace them. It represents a smarter attempt at interpreting the city’s historical context and applying contemporary value to it.

In progressing with their urban planning, modern cities have often struggled to balance conflicting interests between promoting the values of contemporariness and history, domestic and international identities, and style and function. This is what Seoul appears to be experiencing now.

Seoul officials might find earlier experiences of other cities interesting. One example is Britain, which first encountered these debates in the 19th century.

By the end of the 17th century, London, fueled by the results of the Industrial Revolution, emerged as one of the largest and technologically advanced cities in the world. The rapid process of urbanization quickly transferred British agricultural communities to industrial hubs.

By the 19th century, the British were starting to think about the aesthetic perspectives of cities rather than just their functionality.

There were intense debates on what kinds of urban design would ideally represent the British modernity.

The debates led to new experiments. A large number of London’s iconic buildings were built during these times, including the Crystal Palace and the New Palace of Westminster, which of course is also called Houses of Parliament.

The Crystal Palace, planned as the venue of the Great Exhibition of 1851, represented an ambitious attempt at blending art with functionality.

Prince Albert (1819-61), the consort of Queen Victoria, and Sir Henry Cole (1808-1882), civil servant and inventor, were among the influential people involved in the project to design the new building.

They were looking for a new, distinctive design that transcended the heavily-decorative styles of the pre-modern era.

They also thought that ideas produced by the advancement in science and industry should be incorporated in designing new buildings. These debates led to the establishment of a state-run design school and museum in 1837, where designers and architects experimented with new concepts and the effective ways to execute them.

By the time of the Great Exhibition, a beautifully modern building of steel, wood and glass was completed to host what was then the largest international culture and industry the world had ever seen.

The extensive use of glass was a revolutionary outcome enabled by the British advancement in cast-plate glass-producing methods.

Crystal Palace was first built at Hyde Park and, after the exhibition, was relocated and rebuilt in larger form on Penge Common next to Sydenham Hill in southern London. Tragically, the historic building was destroyed by fire in 1936.

The move toward cutting-edge architecture, epitomized by the Crystal Palace, wasn’t without its critics.

They included August Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52) and John Ruskin (1819-1900), who claimed that architects must make greater effort to connect with British values and heritage.

Pugin, equally influential as an architect and critic, expressed a passionate distaste for how rapid industrialization was influencing architecture, which he found as “un-Christian” and “in-human.” He didn’t like the highly manufactured and overly decorative styles of Neo-Classicism architecture either.

What Pugin loved was the medieval Gothic styles of architecture, which he found as “ethical,” as he saw them as products of a hierarchical society driven by moral values.

To him, Gothic structure was an expression of honesty. The buildings were simple, functional and open in structure.

Gothic-style buildings had been gaining popularity in Britain since the late 18th century. These buildings reminded the power elite of their proud, medieval heritage. The simplicity of these styles also reduced the cost for building large structures such as churches.

With the influence of people like Pugin, Gothic emerged as one of the most important architectural styles of the 19th century.

After the fire burned down the Palace of Westminster in 1834, there were feverish debates over how the building should be reconstructed. It was finally decided that it would be rebuilt in Gothic style.

The styles discussed might not be particularly applicable to the contemporary situation of the postmodern period where diverse elements have more significance. Yet the ardent concerns and attention paid to such conflicting issues as modernity and historicity and function and style were among many significant threads that resulted in the emergence of contemporary design, where a diversity of values and perspectives take their hold.

Lee Hee-kyung, who obtained her Ph.D. at the University of London and M.A. at Seoul National University, is a scholar specializing in the art history of East Asia. She lectured at the Department of Ceramics, College of Design at Seoul’s Kookmin University and is currently a visiting fellow at Seoul National University. — ED.