Asif Khan's Vantablack pavilion, the world's first super-black building, will open at the PyeongChang 2018 Opening Ceremony on 9 February 2018.
The Olympic pavilion is coated with Vantablack VBx2 carbon nanotubes and illuminated by thousands of tiny white light rods. These rods extend from the structure's parabolic super-black facade and create the illusion of a field of stars suspended in space. Looking at the building will be the closest experience to looking into space from a point on Earth.
Hyunje Joo's design for a façade in South Korea is a proposal that addresses the separation between the interior and exterior with the construction of a flexible, light, and recyclable architectural element.
The project, a surface made up of 1,500 semi-transparent plastic baskets, diffuses the light and the silhouettes, while offering the ability to be reused with different configurations in different places.
https://www.archdaily.com/881513/1500-semi-transparent-baskets-to-build-a-lightweight-facadeAD Editorial Team
A Swiss Room to Showcase Lausanne’s Candidature to organize the 28th UIA Congress.
The challenge posed by this competition is to design a place object which encapsulates the ideas behind the topic of “Architecture and Water”. It involves creating a place to showcase Lausanne’s Candidature which offers an intuitive approach to the multiple ramifications of this topic. It should, effectively, act as a laboratory of ideas. This place-object must be able to house a table and 4 chairs for discussions, presentation of the candidature, etc. It will be located in the hall of the Convention center in Seoul.
Bricks are as old as the hills. An enduring element of architectural construction, brick has been a material of choice as far back as 7000BC. Through the centuries, bricks have built ancient empires in Turkey, Egypt, Rome and Greece. Exposed stock brick came to define the Georgian era, with thousands of red brick terraces still lining the streets of cities such as London, Edinburgh and Dublin.
South Korea presents an interesting case for the changing face of brick, with a preference for dark, grey masonry striking a heavy, brutalist, yet playful tone. Like many countries, South Korean brick architecture has questioned conformity, experimenting with stepped, perforated, permeable facades, and dynamic, curved, flowing walls. Below, we have rounded up 12 of their most interesting results.
During his frequent travels to Seoul, Hong Kong- and Singapore-based photographer Raphael Olivier noticed a new trend taking the South Korean capital: a crop of geometric, concrete buildings of all genres. He calls the new style Neo-Brutalism, after the modernist movement that proliferated in the late 1950s to 1970s, in which raw concrete was meant to express a truth and honesty. Olivier's observation led him to capture the phenomenon in a personal photo series—a photographic treasure trove of these projects which, when taken as a whole, uncovers a cross-section of this trend in the city's architecture.
The UIA (International Union of Architects) world congresses are a premier forum for professionals and future leaders in the field of architecture to exchange the best and latest practices, visions and first-hand experience. The UIA 2017 Seoul, in particular, will promote various innovative architectural techniques and technologies among member sections and global citizens. In doing so, academic programs, exhibitions, competitions, student activities, and public outreach programs will simultaneously take place.
Since 1953, the 160-mile (260 kilometer) strip of land along the Korean Peninsula's 38th parallel has served as a Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. The DMZ is more than a border; it's a heavily guarded, nearly four-mile-wide (6 kilometer) buffer zone between the two countries. Each military stays behind its own country's edge of the zone, perpetually awaiting potential conflict, and access to the interior of the zone itself is unyieldingly limited. Apart from the landmines and patrolling troops, the interior of the DMZ also holds thriving natural ecosystems that have been the subject of studies on what happens when wildlife is allowed to flourish in the absence of human contact.
In a competition that asked participants to design an underground bathhouse near the Kaesong Industrial Park, a (currently suspended) cooperative economic project that employs workers from both North and South Korea, research initiative Arch Out Loud imagined a DMZ that accommodates non-military structures that are typically seen as out of place in areas of such sensitivity and tension. The winning proposal by Studio M.R.D.O and Studio LAM utilizes the performative element of a bathhouse, where visitors are both audience members and actors, to the address the tensions—both geopolitical, from its surrounding environment, and personal, from the related emotions visitors carry with them—between both groups.
A Design Competition for the Hanyangdoseong On-site Museum in the Hoehyeon Section at the foot of Namsan Mountain
Seoul Metropolitan Government announces a call for entry as below for the architectural design competition aimed to foster Hanyangdoseong On-site Museum in the Hoehyeon Section at the Foot of Namsan Mountain.
Borders - The Korean Demilitarized Zone Underground Bath House
The border between North and South Korea is not just a symbolic line dividing the two countries. It is a high tensioned zone not freely entered or explored. arch out loud is excited to announce their international open-ideas competition, Borders - The Korean Demilitarized Zone Underground Bath House, which will explore the implications of border conditions.
Art Complex aims to contribute to the development of local community, maturity of cultural environment and communication between artistic activities by formation of a complex cultural space for combination of enjoyment of culture, research & development and learning with use of abundant local historical infrastructure and the art archive as the medium.
North Korea is one of the few countries still under communist rule, and probably the most isolated and unknown worldwide. This is a result of the philosophy of Juche – a political system based on national self-reliance which was partly influenced by principles of Marxism and Leninism.
In recent years though, the country has loosened its restrictions on tourism, allowing access to a limited number of visitors. With his personal photo series “North Korea – Vintage Socialist Architecture,” French photographer Raphael Olivier reports on Pyongyang’s largely unseen architectural heritage. ArchDaily interviewed Olivier about the project, the architecture he captured, and what he understood of North Korea’s architecture and way of life.
Courtesy of Selyong Kim, Yongwon Kwon, Seongyen Hwang, and Wonyang Architecture
The collaboration of Seiyong Kim, Yongwon Kwon, Sungyeon Hwang and Wonyang Architecture has won second place in the International Ideas Competition for Establishing Busan Station as The Cub of Creative Economy in Busan, Korea. The competition sought out proposals to revitalize the original downtown area, Busan Station is the starting point for a larger Busan North Port redevelopment project.
Architecture and Urban Planning firm group8asia has won third prize in the Seoul Metropolitan Government competition for the design of Nodeul Island with its sustainable project Seoul Green Dot.
Nodeul Dream Island leads with the idea of Neverland in mind, and isdesigned as “a utopia where nature and serenity are abundant.” Here, it is hoped that environmental economy, and socially sustainable practices can be utilized to create a space to transform the dense urban fabric.
Architects for Urbanity has released its designs for Seoul Urban Womb, a mixed-use women’s and family complex in South Korea. Located in Daebang-dong at the former site of the Seoul Women’s Shelter, the project aims to revitalize the current Seoul Women’s Plaza, a space previously described as “gloomy” and “deathlike.”
The new facility will serve as a connection between the Women’s Plaza and nearby train station, as a mix of public and private space, and is hoped to help “form creative culture, [teach] traditions, and expand the value of gender equality in family and community.”
London-based Gilles Retsin Architecture has unveiled its entry for the Suncheon Art Platform competition, an arts center formed by a low, horizontal structure that frames a series of courtyards and squares in Suncheon, Korea.
India-based Studio MADe has won the Suncheon Art Platform competition with its proposal, The Hidden Cloister. The competition, hosted by the City of Suncheon, South Korea, sought to revitalize the Old City area with an art square featuring an art center.
Through The Hidden Cloister, Studio MADe aims to create a “psychological ‘void’ in the midst of a high-density area by creating an open-to-sky quadrangle as a pure subtraction of ground.” Thus, the proposal creates a new link in the heart of the Old City by connecting the riverbank and public space.
The objective of this competition is to select the appropriate master plan proposal for the National Museum Complex (NMC), with the aim of realizing a cultural base that is the spatial core of the Administrative City. This competition is an open international competition for all professionals and consists of two stages. In stage one (1) of the competition, conceptual land use plan of the whole project site (190,000m2) and conceptual master plan of the project area (75,000m2) of the 1st phase of the NMC project are reviewed. Entries of stage two of the competition are limited to winners of the stage one.
As part of ArchDaily's coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale, we are presenting a series of articles written by the curators of the exhibitions and installations on show.
Of the few dozen articles on architecture and urbanism I have contributed to the Korea Joongang Daily, it was the one entitled “The FAR Game” that received the biggest response from readers. While FAR (Floor Area Ratio) appears to be technical jargon for professionals, it seems that almost every Korean either knows what it is, or has heard about it. If you type yong-jeong-nyul (용적률, the Korean word for FAR) on Korean search engines, an endless stream of news, articles, and commentary pops up. The word speaks to the hunger for living space in a hyper-dense environment, as well as the desire to satisfy that hunger by any means possible, whether by proper planning and tactics or through trickery and obfuscation. It touches both the rich and the poor, the white-collar and the blue-collar, as they navigate their lives together in and around the urban fabric. Upon reading that article, where I had stated that without a doubt it is FAR that drives the architectural character of Korean cities, a renowned urban researcher told me I had hit the nail right on the head.
https://www.archdaily.com/787866/why-the-far-floor-area-ratio-game-inside-koreas-pavilion-at-the-2016-venice-biennaleSung Hong KIM