Architectural utopia shapes, changes city

Kang Hong-goo’s photograph “An Oil Drum” shows the Paju Book City landscape. / Courtesy of MMCA

By Kwon Mee-you

Architecture is not just about designing a building, but more framing of a lifestyle. Architects plan for an ideal, harmonious town, but not all of their designs are realized or become successful.

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon (MMCA) sheds light on the architectural attempts to make an ideal place through the “Experiment of Architopia.”

The term architopia is a portmanteau of architecture and utopia, which refers to the ideal space and lifestyle pursued by architects.

The exhibit summarizes the architectural desire that shaped urban planning in Korea in three major projects — Sewoon Sangga, Paju Book City and Pangyo Housing Complex.

Sewoon Sangga, or Sewoon Shopping Mall, was designed by the late Kim Swoo-geun (1931-1986), one of the Korea’s most acclaimed modern architects. The narrow structure connecting Jongno 3-ga and Toegyero 3-ga in central Seoul was built in 1966.

Sewoon Sangga, now partly demolished, was a pioneering building of a multipurpose complex combining residential and commercial use. Eight structures, one kilometer in length, were connected through an elevated pedestrian deck. It had housing, stores, churches and even a fitness club, which provided convenient city life in one place.

Ahn Chang-mo, Kyonggi University architecture professor, said it was a part of ambitious modernization plan to transform a slum into a modern architecture showpiece.

“The design of Sewoon Sangga was an ideal for modernist architects after the Industrial Revolution, changing a city through architecture. It even encompasses the concept of Bigness suggested by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas,” Ahn said. “However, the January 21 Incident in 1968, in which North Korean commandos attempted to assassinate the South Korean president in Cheong Wa Dae, shifted the center of Seoul’s urban planning from north of the Hangang River to south of the river, or Gangnam. It resulted in the decline of Sewoon Sangga.”

The exhibit features rare documents such as the first draft of Sewoon Sangga’s blueprints created in 1966, currently owned by the Seoul Metropolitan Government.

The experiment continues to Paju Book City and Heyri Art Valley in the 1990s. Located northwest of Seoul, the area was created as an ideal city coexisting with nature.

Unlike crammed apartment complexes, the city aimed to blend the natural environment with voluntary architectural plans as a cultural town. Publishing companies and architects dreamed of an ideal place, but their concept was too naive. The town failed to achieve self-sufficiency and it became jet-black during the night as most people commute from Seoul City or other parts of the metropolitan area. Recently, outlet malls made way into the cultural dream land, poles apart from the original plan.

An architectural experiment of utopia currently underway is the Pangyo Housing Complex in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, south of Seoul. Coming into attention in the 2010s, the housing sites, about an hour away from Seoul, are banned for high-rise apartments and the sites soon became a competition arena for architects.

The buildings here are unique and futuristic, but most of them do not have windows or have small ones. The complex of detached houses did not form a community, but became a horizontal version of typical apartments.

The exhibit does not judge the outcome of the architopia, but rather focuses on how architects interacted with political, social and cultural situations and interpret them in an architectural way.

“Architectural utopia is a dream. Most architecture and urban structures are not maintained as they were originally planned as commercial uses kick in. But the change cannot be blamed,” MMCA curator Jeong Da-young said. “In this era of low growth, it is hard to find large-scale architectural projects. This exhibit tried to question what is the utopia pursued by architects.”

The exhibit runs through Sept. 27. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.mmca.go.kr or call (02) 2188-6000.