Research and Publications

This research focuses on the dichotomy of city and urbanization; “city” being an architectural problem of bounded form, while “urbanism” is an infrastructural project of expansion. It is an uncontested reality that urbanization is a continuous global process that has produced nebulous conurbations labeled as megacities that expand beyond the virtual administrative boundary of said city. If there were a better formal understanding of mega-cities as bounded elements rather than endless sprawling urbanization then it could facilitate managing resources, and producing equitable sustainable developments. This is a problem that architecture can retake under the umbrella of typological urbanism. Avant-garde groups from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s such as Team X, the Situationist, the Structuralist, and the Metabolist worked with ideas of megaforms and megastructures to address this issue. Although most of these proposals remained as paper architecture, perhaps their abstract concepts could present a contemporary architectural solution for the question: can architecture have a role in defining a clear idea of form at an extra-large urban scale that properly identifies city-form in a megacity as opposed to sprawling urbanization? This research reevaluates some of these ideas for the 21st-century megacity, using Seoul as an initial case study due to its clear demarcation of historical periods that produced specific typologies for each period. The research presents the concept for an infra-architectural hybrid model of typological islands and subterranean megastructure that organizes Seoul as a flexible multi-linear city. The research has validated the existence of some of the 20th-century concepts for architectural islands and megastructural pedestrian layers by demonstrating their existence in Seoul. The results have been published in several peer-review journals.