What’s On

AAVS Seoul has been operating the workshop series reassessing and developing the topic of ‘social algorithms’ through an evolutional lens over the past two years. In 2023, the concept of phenotype and genotype was translated into architectural terms and experimented with related methodology, and in 2024, based on the interpretation, we discovered and investigated the evolution of Seoul as a city in 2024. Each unit investigated and proposed: rediscovery and reuse possibilities of concrete, idiosyncratic construction phenomena deprived of social condition in Seoul, ruleset and system controlling unseen forces operating urban spaces, urban structure interpreting senses by speculating beyond perspectives. Although the unit’s perspectives, topic, and methodology are different, we reached the common ground that Seoul consists of heterogeneous spaces, forms, and materials.

Anchored in common sense, AAVS Seoul 2025 delves with ‘Compressed City Seoul’ as a title. Seoul has been transforming from a medieval to post-modern city in a shorter period of 100 years. This compressed transformation reveals heterogeneous and dialect urban space, architecture, and social systems unlike European cities gradually evolved. These characteristics are most pronounced in the older districts north of the Han River called Gangbuk, but they are pervasive conditions in Seoul as a whole, found even in the Gangnam district, developed as a planned city in the 70s and 80s. Urban spaces, architectural form, typology, materials, and social systems have reached their current states through the process of transformation, variation, decline, and mutation, and these evolutions are still in progress. As such, heterogeneity and diversity, which are not easy to judge in binary terms of good or bad, brought about the specificity of Seoul.

However, Seoul is losing this specificity. That is why the proliferation of redevelopment buildings such as office buildings, apartments, and officetel designed and constructed with transparent façades and uniform plans for capital accumulation at a rapid speed although those buildings look attractive with sleek designs. The diverse and heterogeneous urban spaces of Yeouido, Gangnam, Sangam, Magok, Jongno, and Euljiro are being quickly erased without any open discussion regarding their value and replaced with homogenized and commodified urban spaces and architecture. How do we rediscover and elevate the hybrid, layered, and contradictory value of Seoul by interrupting this situation? What transformation, regressions, variation, and mutation can be investigated and manipulated as a driving force for revaluation? In 2025, each unit will address these topics and questions through its perspectives: technology, material, construction, typology, sensory perception, situation, or intuition.