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To WdKA graduates platform
Youngji
Lee

FlatCity

Project details

Programme
Master – Interior Architecture: Research + Design

The project speculates the new typology of an urban city which is constructed based on the severe commercialization under Capitalism. FlatCity visualizes the shape of the city which is exaggeratedly accelerated the replacement of commercial places.

The idea was started from the thesis, ‘Absurd City‘. The text is especially focusing on the city of Seoul where has been developed in high speed for efficiency and profit, it reveals how the city mechanism (regarding market economy) has deformed the condition of urban state and how the humans lost their agency of it.

In the city like Seoul, most commercial places are existed and replaced not for human necessity but for mechanism operation (highly related to the value of the real estate and market logic), which doesn’t allow the place to be absorbed to humans. This brings a sense of disconnection from the place to humans while the constant replacement is ongoing. Meanwhile, as this discontinuity by the transition continues, continuous discontinuity becomes the new condition of the city.

Billboard

In order to represent this state, I chose a billboard as a crucial element in the city, at the same time a metaphor. The billboard on the architecture reveals the content inside, also reflects the market logic from outside to survive, so the surface of the billboard is the symbolisation of compressing and flattening of interiority and exteriority. 

A scale of the store is constructed from the scale of the billboard. I extruded from the frame of the surface to the volume, to represent that the interior is designed only to rely on the commercial value. 

In this sense, I discover a new evaluation of architecture as a skeleton separate inside and outside. The traditional role of architecture is dissolved. The architecture in FlatCity is just a penetrable container to expose the interior.

Moreover, the surface of the billboard might reverse interiority and exteriority. In the conventional sense, the interior is containing the consumable content, and the exterior is formed by the urban infrastructure of the system. However, as the surface has flattened those, there are an infrastructural mechanism that is running inside, and tangible outcome(product) that is exhibited and consumed outside.

This process of dematerialisation of urban elements proposes the speculative urban landscape we are facing in the near future and the unexpected spatial quality of it. Furthermore, it emphasises conscious awareness and response of the human about the new way of mechanism and its form which has started to mutate already.

For the video and details, please visit the website, FlatCity.