Simon Kim and Weitzman Students Featured in 2019 Seoul Biennale

Associate Professor Simon Kim and Weitzman students from his 2018 701 studio are featured in the 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism: Collective City.

Kim's project, "TYOLDNPAR: The Heterotopial City," was submitted by his firm, Ibañez Kim. It aims to address the following concerns:

1. Masterplanning: Single visions of urbanism and architecture could not be more out of touch.
2. Citizenship: In a postmodern society, there are as many forms of communication as thereㄹㅏㅕ are social groups, and truth can no longer be the alibi of one ruling class of citizen.
3. Natures: In a posthuman environment, there are no longer separate identities of human-nonhuman, wild and civilized, public-private, inside-outside.
To address this, a crypto-city made of familiar places is the location of new collective commons, synthetic natures, and hybrid environments. As a heterotopia, this city compresses elements of real metropolises into incongruities and opportunities that reveal our current human nature, and suggests alternate actions.

"Montreal, Sensate and Augmented" was created by Kim's 2018 701 studio. Of the project, they write:

Architecture of a city as a proposition or a form of intellectual investigation is tethered to a built, shared environment. Its implicit and explicit meanings and affects are to be developed in material and also in behavior over time. To do this, we will imbue architecture and urbanism with duration, with its own agency and self governance in the location of Montreal. Montreal’s history in Expos and Olympics places it as an ideal postindustrial model with an apex towards advanced thinking of new environment and eco-intelligence.

This studio will break from the classical hierarchy of humancentric design and allow for nonhuman authorship and stewardship. Rather than design from a compositional position, and to dwell in a seamless zone of human comfort, this studio will engage in a design process with transformations over time, to produce environments that change and behave for other than human requirements (such as seasons, water, air, animal). Rather than determining architecture from a top-down application of function and use, we are more interested in a durational and temporal occupation of space that is for both the human and nonhuman.

Participating Weitzman students include Mostafa Akbari, Yunyoung Lina Choi, Wenna Dai, Zihao Fang, Yuting He, Wenqi Huang, Mikyung Lee, Chuqi Liu, Bowen Qin, Yingke Sun, Si Yang Xiao, Weimeng Zhang, and Chengyao Zong.

Kim and previous 701 students also participated in the 2017 Seoul Biennale.

The Biennale opened in September and is on view through November 10  in Dongdaemun Design Plaza.

It is divided into four sections: Thematic Exhibition (curated by Beth Hughes), Cities Exhibition (curated by Yim Dongwoo and Rafael Luna), Global Studios (curated by Sanki Choe) and On-site Projects (curated by Young Chul Jang).