The “Imminent Commons” Biennale of Seoul 2017 is an exciting opportunity to reevaluate the significance and, even more elementally, the very on-going possibility of architecture vis à vis the contemporary city. The Biennale features The Cities Exhibition, which will be installed in the main hall of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, and offers the fascinating prospect of 50 different thematic exhibits coming from cities all over the world. OBRA is contributing to the Biennale the exhibit design of The Cities Exhibition.

In practical terms, the architectural design of the exhibit focuses mainly on the successful resolution of very specific formal issues related to the complexity of an exhibition designed “by committee” by curators working independently from each other in the four corners of the world. It is this characteristic of the project that suggests the possibility of regarding it as a modest experiment of analogy with the city: the organization of vacant group form available to be occupied by unpredictable content and organized non-hierarchically to invite free movement. These design premises required also a subtle but rigorous structure to prevent the project from contributing to a descent into a potentially chaotic experience that the collage-like assembly of disparate content might bring about.

As a modest analogy of urban space, the design of this ephemeral structure aspires to a normative repetitiveness that risks certain dissolution of form and a numbing of the senses of the perception of spatial sequences. The project will define a certain rhythm of experience related to the time needed to negotiate arrays of overlapping trajectories which will be made subliminally legible through an insistence on certain thresholds sequences, some axial and some diagonal. The depth of the resulting layered space is sometimes revealed in the enfilades of doors that cut deep into the structure here and there as a perspectival projection of potential trajectories open to the visitors. Relying on the utmost geometric simplicity and the architectural resources that, as described above, can be easily missed or dismissed, the architectural design will recede perceptually to give primacy of place to the exhibited content, while at the same time trying to sustain it with a measure of discreet order.

The structure, conceived as a repetitive grouping of small galleries, mostly 3 meters wide by 6 meters long, aims to create the atmosphere of repetitive neutrality necessary to contain all the unpredictable collision of richness the curatorial project proposes. The result is an undifferentiated labyrinth, one in which no proposed sequence of experience is particularly privileged and in which each visitor can trace his or her own personal trajectory. The only exceptions, three larger spaces for public assembly, are created not by adding anything to the project but by negatively subtracting walls and creating larger gaps.