Unit 4
Territorial Sabotage
: From tracing Seoul’s possibilities to recompositing its urban identity

As we move forward into the third year of our unit, we are now challenging the typical morphology and urban fabric of the city blocks in Seoul, embracing an evolutionary perspective to inspire change and drive innovation in architectural design. The focus of our exploration is the very DNA of urban structures – the city block – and how it contributes to the overall ‘Image of the City’, a concept deeply elaborated by Kevin Lynch. It’s through these building blocks that we’ll tap into the essence of Seoul’s architectural identity and offer transformative solutions.

Lynch stated, “A good environmental image gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security,” and this image is essentially a mental construct that reflects a city’s identity. This concept parallels Aldo Rossi’s ideology in ‘The Architecture of the City’, where he emphasizes the influence of urban artifacts in city development and identity. The layers of history embedded within the city, considering their impact on identity, sense of place, and the collective memory. By intertwining the past, present, and future, we envision a Seoul that embraces its cultural heritage while actively engaging with contemporary challenges and aspirations. We shall champion these insights, drawing boundaries and creating space just as Giovanni Battista Piranesi did in his ‘Campo Marzio Ichnographia’, exploring the simplicity and depth of boundary delineation in a cityscape.

While these theoretical perspectives provide our unit with a robust intellectual backbone, we intend to execute our ideas using AI techniques. We will use 2D GANs as 2D plan generators of block boundaries, and 3D GAN for morphology generation of each block, in an attempt to redefine the city blocks of Seoul. These generated outputs will then be synthesized and rendered through diffusion models, providing an advanced and coherent representation of our theoretical framework.

Our agenda, however, goes beyond merely applying these technological tools. We aim to redefine ‘evolution’ from our perspective. Evolution is not simply a linear progression but a dynamic process encompassing different pathways and diversities, a concept we’ve explored in previous workshops. Therefore, our exploration of the city blocks in Seoul will not be a straightforward upgrade, but rather a series of diverse and multiform transformations that give birth to an evolved urban fabric, catering to the multifaceted needs of future generations. 

The final output could be evolution of the cityscape of Seoul, challenging its current morphology and anticipating future mutations through an innovative fusion of architectural theory and artificial intelligence.

AA VISITING SCHOOL SEOUL 2023
SOCIAL ALGORITHMS 10.0 : EVOLUTION

https://www.social-algorithms.com/sa-archives/sa-10-0

The last ten years of “AAVS Seoul” as the theme of “Social Algorithms” oscillated between site-driven research, which unveils Seoul as an actual city, and computational design experiments under the diverse algorithmic processes. This 2023 summer, we are trying to do a little step up based on accumulated experiences, titled as one theme, “Evolution,” explaining life’s diversity and exquisiteness by differentiated survival and breeding in ‘Nature selection.’ Humans have evolved with adaptations and variations through social rituals, systems, and machines, and architecture has been a crucial role in this process as an essential part of social systems. Therefore, we would like to experiment with how architecture is related to human evolution in social systems and machines.

In 2023, methodological experiments are mainly conducted through two perspectives: finding the ‘Phenotype’ by investigating the social and spatial structure within life forms from the actual city of Seoul, developing a system from a hypothetical social rule set, and discovering the ‘Genotype’. There will be two units with independent briefs, methods, seminars, and specific workshops for each perspective, and lecture series will accompany them to develop the theme of AAVS Seoul. In the future, Methodological experimentation will expand into architectural argument debate over the years.