The Emerging Corporate Territories returns to Songdo, the newly finished corporate hub of South Korea, the wannabe Singapore-Hong-Kong international node of the booming economic future of North East Asia. Smart, Leed certified and directly plugged in into an airport, equipped with one Central Park and one Venice Canal, Songdo is the latest venture in the corporate real-estate bonanza.
So new and so fast with so much glass, and so few people walking down its streets. This sleek ghost town is not only waiting for its people but also itching to have its first architectural reading. So join us as we depart from the scale of the master-plan and delve specifically into these shimmering buildings, to understand each node of this wired operational network through its own face and skin.
Taking as a given the dominant form of the typical plan, the deus ex machina of architectural solutions, we will challenge this in-discriminant sprawl of towers strictly vertically. Each student will propose a full bleed curtain-wall facade system, which will speak of feeders such as economic and technologic drivers as well as corporate aesthetics and architectural fetishes.
Koshirakura/Tokyo
Koshirakura Landscape Workshop/The City After-Image
Friday 22 August – Friday 12 September 2014
Koshirakura stage: August 22 - September 9. Tokyo stage: September 10 - 12
Two consecutive workshops will bring together contrasting visions of the present cultural and economic climate of Japan seen from two extreme sites, one rural and one urban, located 200km apart. Participants are encouraged to apply for both workshops in order to document a set of landscapes: a micro-social fabric and architecture of urban erasure.
Landscape Workshop, Koshirakura Village, Niigata
Launched in 1996, the Koshirakura Landscape Workshop has evolved into an annual local event. Its overall agenda is to explore a form of social and cultural sustainability within the post-agricultural community of Koshirakura. A new phase of the programme will set out a long-term strategy for an intercultural revitalisation tailored to the community, with a series of building experiments with locally available materials such as timber, earth, stone and bamboo, documentary making and informal events all running in tandem with Koshirakura’s annual local festivals.
The City After-Image (AA Maeda Workshop) F-2 Site, Tokyo
The F-2 project – an ongoing urban redevelopment scheme in Fujimi 2-Chome 10 Ban Area in central Tokyo – is probably the last example of urban transformation on this kind of scale in Japan. This workshop is planned as a series to coincide with key stages of demolition and construction and will take place over the next five years. Utilising spaces within the project site, the workshop will explore and test alternative strategies for the creative use of urban spaces caught somewhere between scrap and buildings, while capturing a series of moments through which hidden layers, interiority and sections reveal their narratives, documenting the surrounding city as a catalogue of beautifully incomplete objects.