unsangdong architects By Yoon Gyoo Jang
Seoul shows a complex quality that tradition, nature and modern architecture collide with each other. The city of Seoul is a typical model of a complex city that crosses between the present and the past. Seoul is phenomenal with its historical buildings, old palaces, mountains, and modern architecture, all coexisting in one place. The collision can be seen as an important clue to trace fundamental architecture. It asks a psychological identity that a citizen must have. Fundamental architecture is not just in a physical factor, it is in finding of psychological origin. Fundamental architecture may not be in doors, floors, and ceilings that constitute the physical properties of architecture; rather it may be in spiritual ways that cities and cultures have been constructed. It is relevant that we cannot “read” a metropolitan city by just looking at its simple physical factors and that we can recognize time as the accumulated outcome of history. A city can be seen as a systematic chunk of huge history and a complex outcome of a network where if one aspect changes, then everything changes. By making more than a basic space and a form, architecture can redefine the ways of reacting to and changing a city, its social context, and people’s thinking. Fundamental architecture is connected to an essential question about common value. I return to an old subject that perceives the usual value of a city, its environment, politics, culture, and art and to the pure question that changes the philosophical point of view by asking about the fundamental meaning of an architectural project. Using Deleuze: it has a meaning that recognizes and recombines society’s diverse phenomena through the folding-unfolding structure that made a simultaneous breakaway from Descartes’ dominant world. It is similar to constructing a diverse world that makes a reform structure of absoluteness. It creates 326
a new kind of potential of “process of difference between life”, which is produced by “think differently”—the key philosophy of Bergson. Recalling fundamental architecture could mean a substitution of new imagination. I try to recognize essential architecture as a new aspect that can build a new kind of imagination like Imagination city (Mongyudowondo). I attempt to substitute a basic natural form for ultimate essential factors and to construct a basic human being’s imagination by eliminating a clue of architectural features. It is about realizing an utopia which can be a city or an architecture and about building a dystopia dismantlement which is neither a city nor an architecture. It’s to do with reappearing Chora architecture, the 3rd architectural origin, that exists between an eternal figure and its sensual copy. I question fundamental architecture by reinventing the historical classics which is now gone, Mongyudowondo. At some point, the disappearing classics have mythic structure that could not be accomplished easily in a real world. Even if tradition of Korea has gone, it is still considered as an important fundamental element. I build an urban structure with a typical traditional landscape painting. Oriental landscape painting is about drawing an ideal scenery. The oriental artists depict nature with fraction of the memory and their own imagination. Not only reflecting sustainability of nature, but also try to construct a new utopia. Landscape drawing can be explained as “visual media” that has trace and process of time in view of oriental naturalism. I suggest “Artificial nature-city as an imagination” which is an architecture, and also a living creature, that is constantly changing and breathing with a nature. I abstract diverse features such as Korean mountain, field, valley, water and combine them with architecture.