COURSES
DESIGN STUDIO COURSES
From the Last Five Years: 2017-2022
SUPER SANG GA
RMIT University
2022 Spring Semester
Master of Architecture + Master of Urban Design Graduate Studio
Awarded:
Design Excellence Award in Urban Design and Architecture Design.
The studio examined the city through the lens of typological urbanism. The term ‘SangGa’ describes a type of urban form that is an aggregate of commercial and residential buildings. The urban fabric of Seoul is a patchwork of these typological ‘islands’ in which sections of the city and blocks form discrete assemblages of buildings, small thoroughfares, and public spaces, that are separated from each other by roads, and other linear infrastructures. The city is served by an extensive public transit system, including the world’s longest and most heavily used metro system that serves to connect the islands via a vast underground megastructure or subway tunnels and pedestrian underpasses.
For the studio, students were asked to analyze Line 2 of the subway system in Seoul which encircles the city. Each student selected a site within a 10-minute walking radius from a station to produce a new typology of an autonomous urban block.
SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE 2
Hanyang University
2021 Fall Semester
Undergraduate Studio 3 - Adaptive Reuse
Locating underutilized buildings in Seoul, the students were asked to reconsider education facilities for the 21st century beyond the traditional school format. Students were asked to envision their own briefs for a new cultural industry that requires learning facilities to be distributed throughout the city and propose a prototypical facility.
HYBRID HOUSING ISLAND 3
HIGHRISE HIGH-DENSITY
Hanyang University
2021 Spring Semester
Undergraduate Studio 3
Working as a single block, students were asked to explore verticalism through limited footprints. Programs for production, leisure, consumption, and education were distributed among the students and each had to hybridize their program with housing.
SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE 1
Hanyang University
2020 Fall Semester
Undergraduate Studio 3 - Adaptive Reuse
Reacting to new technologies such as AI, students adapted a social hall from the 1960s into a new cultural analytical and archival facility of the city.
HYBRID HOUSING - SINGLE BUILDING
Hanyang University
2020 Spring Semester
Undergraduate Studio 3
This studio explored the concept of hybridizing social infrastructure and housing within a singular building that could reactivate certain points in a gentrifying neighborhood.
PRODUCTION URBANISM
Hanyang University
2019 Fall Semester
Undergraduate Studio 3 - Adaptive Reuse
(Published)
As a way to explore topics of equity in the city, this adaptive reuse studio explored bringing micro-factories back into the neighborhood of Dongdaemun in Seoul.
HYBRID HOUSING ISLAND-2
MIDRISE HIGH-DENSITY
Hanyang University
2019 Spring Semester
Undergraduate Studio 4
(Exhibited: Seoul Biennale 2019)
Based on the statistics calculated by KOSIS (Korean Statistics Information Services), the population of Seoul is likely to peak by 2030 due to the low mortality among senior citizens, low fertility rate, and increasing land prices that are pushing the urban expansion towards the fringe areas. Korea’s population over the age of 65 currently accounts for 14.3% of the total population, which is likely to increase to 25% by the time the population peaks. By 2060, the population over the age of 65 will make up over forty percent of the total population. The existing paradoxical condition of Seoul becoming a Shrinking City as well as an expanding urbanity is then likely to transform the cityscape into pockets of urban voids, possibly deteriorating its urban efficiency for an elder population that will dominate the territory if unexplored. The studio focused on this eminent future by investigating potential urban transformation and typologies that can respond to the current condition and evolve with the drastic demographic change that will occur in the coming decades. Students focused on architecture becoming a background setting for a hyper-digitalized society for single people, including the elder as well as the young population. The site selected is specific to the aging urbanity. The studio focused on city blocks with buildings over the age of 60 that have remained from the post-war era and are doomed to be replaced by larger development. The work presented represents a transformation of one of these aging blocks for typologies of multigenerational cohabitation and production within the city.
HYBRID HOUSING ISLAND-1
LOWRISE HIGH-DENSITY
Hanyang University
2018 Fall Semester
Undergraduate Studio 2
This studio explored low-rise high-density housing as a new urban block island typology. The goal was to produce an autonomous block through the composition of hybrid housing. Each student has a micro plot within the block, and each student needs to propose a house plus an alpha program of their choice without repeating someone else’s.
BOUNDED INTERIORITY
Hanyang University
2018 Spring Semester
Undergraduate Foundation 2nd year
The exercise asks for the students to work with a 30cm cube, and decompose it to produce habitable environments. Students learn concepts of computational thinking through this analog exercise while forcing them to work with restricted parameters. The example shown on the right, for example, manipulated progressive sections of the cube to form levels, furniture, and enclosure. The cubes are meant to stack so that each student forms connections to their neighbor.
ORANGE COMMONS
Rhode Island School of Design
Department of Interior Architecture
2017 Fall Semester
Graduate Design Studio on Adaptive Reuse
The MBTA Orange Line is perhaps the most inclusive of all subway lines in the Boston Metro region. As such, this studio focused on hybridizing each station as an urban node, providing ammenities and services to the neighbohring communities within a 10 minute walking radius. The program varied depending on the contextual needs for soft infrastructure.
METROPOLITAN HYBRIDS
Rhode Island School of Design
Department of Interior Architecture
2017 Spring Semester
Graduate Design Studio on Adaptive Reuse
(Exhibited: Seoul Biennale 2017)
As the urban scenery becomes increasingly denser, it is necessary to evaluate the role of future building stock and infrastructure to achieve higher urban efficiency by generating new hybrid infra-architectural typologies. By reevaluating these urban deficiencies, through an adaptive reuse strategy, this studio will focus on conceptualizing how housing block buildings can become operative to the urban scale. This Interior Urbanism logic occurs through a process of hybridization between housing, infrastructure, and industry, where the re-programming of urban deficient structures can have a dialogue between how the building functions as an interior space and how the building functions as part of a system in the city.
This adaptive reuse studio focused on master planning a series of 100m long by 10m wide buildings from the 1970s that run parallel to the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul.