In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The arrival of the new millennium brought home the fact that architectural and urban discourse was now being shaped by two powerful forces: one was the globalization of the discourse, moving the consideration of design activities beyond the confines of national boundaries; the other was an interdisciplinary approach emphasizing the interdependence of architecture, landscape design, and urban design. Accordingly, definitions of architecture and of the city had begun to change in a variety of ways. Until the mid-1990s, the construction of new towns and cities in Korea had occurred within the parameters set down during the developmental period, which meant that government-run institutes were in charge of town planning. They had relied on three methods to effectively organize new urban spaces: the concentric expansion of urban boundaries; the compartmentalization of blocks based on the “neighborhood unit” theory; and the construction of large complexes of apartments on previously desolate land. This approach came under greater scrutiny in the mid-1990s when a sweeping power shift took place in Korea. Leaders of the pro-democracy movement had lent their support to the civilian government that took office following the presidential election of 1992, and they attempted to create an alternative context for the theory and practice of city planning. These efforts led to a full-scale implementation of the Local Autonomy Law in 1995. Environmental activist groups launched campaigns against the despoliation of the natural environment and demanded sufficient compensation for any damage incurred. The sustained momentum toward democratization convinced the government and corporate interests that these demands could not be ignored, and they began negotiations. This marked a turning point in Korea’s urban discourse. The highest priority in urban development would now be given to fostering communication between diverse interest groups rather than to the unilateral implementation of urban policies. This shift fostered a wide range of efforts to rehabilitate urban environments that had been desolated during the developmental period. Vacant land was turned into parks, and slums were cleared for the construction of new apartment complexes. The restoration of the Cheonggyecheon stream provided clear evidence that a profound change was underway: “The project which removed portions of a grade-level roadway and a elevated freeway to make way for the re-creation of an underlying stream as the central feature of a roughly 6-kilometer-long public park, symbolized a major paradigm shift in urban discourse from a focus on relatively functional matters to broader issues about lifestyle and livability.”1 It also brought issues of urban ecology to the forefront intermingled with political agendas (figure 9.1). New Paradigms for Urban Design Chapter 9 Fig. 9.1 Restoration of the Cheonggyecheon stream (Photo by Young-Chae Park) New Paradigms for Urban Design 127 This momentum accelerated with the involvement of architects in the planning of urban projects, bringing new perspectives to urban design. The urban planners who had dominated the process until then had based their calculations on quantifications of density, zoning, block size, and circulation. In contrast, architects thought in terms of skylines, access axes, and sequences of movement in urban space. Urban infrastructure, they felt, could be designed using comparable criteria. They regarded streets as places where diverse cultural activities could occur and argued for the importance of void spaces to sustain the potential for urban growth and change. The new themes—bottom-up planning, environmental concerns, and adaptive urban change— continued to reverberate throughout the 1990s and beyond. Songdo New City, Sejong Administrative City, Paju Book City, and the Heyri Art Valley were all projects whose planning was carried out under the new paradigm for urban design. Architecturally, many changes were seen during this period. The successive collapses of Seongsu Bridge in 1994 and the Sampoong Department Store in 1995 brought forth scathing criticisms of the commercialization of architecture (figure 9.2), and with architects themselves gradually acknowledging the negative impact of this commercialization, the architecture community began to play a more deliberate role in the formation of a new discourse. In addition, the onset of international competition played a major role in setting the direction of architectural design in Korea, which had emerged by then as a significant market for a global architectural community. The buildings of the Samsung Museum of Art in Leeum, designed by three European architects, Mario Botta, Jean Nouvel, and Rem Koolhaas, were a signal example of the participation of world-renowned architects in Korea-related projects, stimulating a constructive competition between Korean architects and those residing elsewhere...

Share