Reimagining the New Density in Apartment Urbanism

Abstract

Seoul, the capital city of Republic of Korea, has gone through rapid and compressed growth since 1960s as a response to reconstructing the city after the devastating crisis of Korean War. In part of facilitate the development, the national government has actively adopted the form of apartment under supportive national policies and planning instruments. The mass production in large quantities of apartment complexes has rested on the conviction that it would be an effective device to deal with ultra-dense environment in Seoul where the skyrocketing population growth has challenged the demand of adequate living space (Kim, 2018).
It is true that densification is one of the core in contemporary society, giving essence in urbanity. It has been always the intriguing topic in urbanism which dominates and imposes the prevailing theories and manifests at that ages. Yet, what constituted the density in apartment complexes in Seoul is the logic of capitalism, where the quantity of floor area of verticality decides everything in speculating the gainable maximum profits. Importantly, the challenges inherent in apartment lie at its scale of complex (block), not at the building itself, as Grands Ensemble, where the characteristics of enlargement and internalization execute the exclusivity and polarization between spaces. While the more than half of Seoul’s citizens are living in apartments, the ongoing phenomenon of producing apartment complex would continue to proliferate, as the desire to live in luxurious and enclosed community will not disappear.
This graduation project aims to explore the new role of apartment complexes in relation to urban fabric, and to open the discussion for envisioning integrated and dynamic living environment. Therefore, it seeks the new definition of ‘Apartment Urbanism’ in Seoul, where the density is represented not only by form, but also by its function and overarching relationships that operate simultaneously. Borrowing the lens of ‘depth structure’, the orienting concept in implementing design strategies as territorial, scalable and institutional depths, this project argues that the despite the rationale in area-based approach characterized by rigid zoning system, the relation-based approach using patterns delivers the possibility to embrace all interacting and conflicting forces as a cohesive language. Conditioned at different settings of private and public properties, it proposes a model that is more adjustable to the context and adaptive to process, ultimately shaping the synergetic relationship between spaces and people.