This workshop revolves around Sewoon Sangga, a utopian megastructure built between 1967 and 1972 stretching between the historical Jongro-gu and Jung-gugo neighbourhoods in Seoul. Our interest in this building was initially sparked by its central role in one of the most successful international K-drama exports of recent years, Vincenzo (2021). In this series, a Korean-born mafia lawyer, adopted as a child by an Italian family, returns to Seoul to retrieve a hidden treasure: a large amount of gold stored in an elaborately secured vault installed in secrecy underneath Geumga Plaza, an inconspicuous and slightly run-down building housing small businesses and flats. This is embodied in the series by Sewoon Sangga.

Designed by Korean architect Kim Swoo Geun, Sewoon Sangga is a more than one-kilometre-long brutalist complex, featuring a mixed-used concept. It was the first building of its kind in South Korea, erected on a strip of land cleared during WWII as a precautionary measure to prevent potential fires from spreading in the city and to provide safe passage for the city’s inhabitants during evacuations. The modernist utopian vision with its vast network of alleys, passages and staircases and its abundance of apartments and shops soon proved less successful than envisioned, at least from an official perspective. Instead, Sewoon Sanga, as the artist Seo Hyun Suk put it, “embraced the impossibility of what it had promised” (Hyun-Suk Seo, Fantastic City, 2018).

Threatened with demolition, not to retrieve any hidden treasures though but as part of the city's rapid and relentless redevelopment since the 1980s, the building was rather ironically saved by the financial crisis of 2008. Remodeling of a section of the complex has since been completed and it is now being marketed as a hub for start-up businesses. Other efforts to revitalise and refurbish the complex are underway, with varying degrees of success. However, Sewoon Sangga also remains home to a large number of small businesses including mom-and-pop stores, many of which go back decades and seem to sell goods no longer needed today, as well as offices and apartments.

Our workshop is less interested in exhaustively exploring any part of the history of Sewoon Sangga. Rather, we are looking at it as a 'boundary object', defined by Susan Leigh Star as something that can facilitate communication between different social and disciplinary groups, each with different perspectives and interests. A boundary object provides a tangible object that can be understood and engaged with across different contexts.

The workshop will feature six papers on aspects of Sewoon Sangga by scholars from architecture, media studies, cultural studies, urban studies and sociology. The presentations will be followed by a discussion of the papers in relation to each other, together with invited experts on curating – including the architectural exhibition „SOS Brutalism“ – and interdisciplinary research. The aim is to thereby reflect on the potential and challenges of this collaborative research project to investigate the physical and symbolic function of buildings in relation to their role in social, cultural and historical processes.

If you are interested in attending the workshop, please email us at:
sewoonsangga@gmail.com

The full program can be found here: AO_Workshop 2024_Programme (wird in neuem Tab geöffnet)