Unit 1

Concrete Matters

Catherine Ahn + Fabrizio Furiassi

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980 

Overview
Concrete Matters will focus on one of the most controversial building materials: concrete. Given the omnipresence of concrete in contemporary urban developments, the unit will offer a wide range of building-related topics and scales of investigation connected to the “evolution of Seoul as a city.” The investigation will start with a brief digression of the global history of concrete, and general theories and techniques of materials, then will shift its focus to the specific analysis of the entanglements of concrete in the environmental and cultural transformations of Seoul. These analyses will serve as a foundation for the students to reimagine Seoul through concrete-centric design projects, and to engage in critical discussions about the city's history, politics, economics, and ecologies through the lens of concrete.


Concrete Matters will employ a materialist approach to research—inspired by the material turn in the social sciences—as a means for registering, interpreting, and narrativizing Seoul’s urban evolution. Concrete will be examined as a construction material particularly dependent on labor and a large variety of trades that, compared to other materials, makes it “a step closer to humans.”   This social dimension of concrete will help the students understand how this construction material organizes, supports, and informs the agency of social actors shaping the built environment. Participants will study in particular how concrete influences space production, post-occupancy, and transformation of built environments, and the social and political experiences connected to them.


Concrete Matters will explore concrete buildings and urban developments using lenses such as typology, style, form, meaning, experience, affect, heritage, construction speed, scale, and structural and functional performance. Through these lenses, students will be asked to define the implications of concrete construction in the evolution of Seoul by examining existing buildings, and how they participate in disciplinary and transdisciplinary discourses and controversies. In this sense, the unit will take a critical look at Seoul as a laboratory where the variety and convergence of “high” and “low” forms of architecture, from signature buildings to large-scale developments, facilitates a rich set of analyses, conversations, discoveries, and proposals.



Structure & Methods
Concrete Matters will consist of 1-2 days of intensive seminar and tutorials (reading and discussion), 3-4 days of field research and interpretation (photography, video documentation, and editing), and 3-4 days for the preparation of a design proposal and presentation (short texts, drawings, and images).

 

Before launching into research and design work, the class will be exposed to a variety of artistic precedents and theoretical frameworks for materialisms and concrete. These articles and examples will be discussed collectively and will serve as references for the participants in the definition of their design work. Discussions about the participants’ objectives and works-in-progress will be conducted in a supportive workshop environment that will hone in on each participant’s research agenda and approach to Concrete Matters. 

 

Students will be provided with a list of potential research case studies based on the “Concrete Seoul Map.” During the field research, participants will be asked to use iPhone/Android photography and videography to document their chosen site(s). Participants will be given short tutorials on investigative research, video editing (Adobe Premier, Final Cut, or iMovie), and drawing techniques. 


The unit aims to provide participants with qualitative tools for exploratory analysis, representation, design, and “critical action” to identify and document complex material trajectories in the city as well as a framework to interpret and narrativize them into project-based architectural and urban interventions. 

AAVS Seoul 2023 Unit1, Do Gyeong Kang

UNIT TUTORS

Catherine Ahn

NYIT/ Andrew Franz Architect

Fabrizio Furiassi

Parsons School of Design
/ University of Basel