City Design (MA)
Seungyeol Lee
Seungyeol is an MA City Design graduate from the Royal College of Art. Following on from the completion of his undergraduate degree in South Korea, He continued to work in Seoul, completing his experience from Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art and Seoul Centre for Architecture and Urbanism as his curatorial studies. He worked on curatorial studies exploring what many exhibitions and research could learn from modern art, including urbanism and architectural history. In 2018, He coordinated the ‘Who/How make the city’ hosted by the Seoul Metropolitan for preparing Seoul Biennale of architecture and urbanism.
Whilst at the RCA, his research has looked at anthropological networks and consequential questions of social inequality and deprivation. His work examines the mechanisms behind these networks with the intention of inevitably questioning ‘How do we live together?’ and the boundaries of the disappearance and indifference we inhabit today. In doing so, his work aims to give a communal space to support social interaction. In February 2020, he received a Scholarship to participate in MPavilion in Melbourne as program collaborators. In order to take part in discussions with international collaborators who focus on the development of affordable, sustainable housing in a series of ‘What is Home?’.
During the 15 months of the City Design programme, he studied in Haringey, The Sky City where he asked complicated issues and social housing surrounding the fracture of community within social inequalities. His work stimulates collective community, led by instant family, exploring alternative approaches for residents to implement intensification.
Throughout his MA, Seungyeol has looked for a critical approach to his areas of interest through the use of anthropological research and urban analytical tools. His current research interest is more comprehensive than aesthetical issues. He has urban philosophical issues that he would particularly like to investigate.
He researches ethical issues concerning social disconnection, in particular, examining the relationship between personal history and urban. In criticism, he questioned whether the urban policy of regeneration, that is experienced in Seoul and London, is justifiable.
Consequently, he made a new type of family by providing a social network. Via the principles of popularity, participation, unexpectedness and sustainable relationships, the dailiness of the city is experienced through the urban categories of aesthetics.
Instant family city colonies skycity
Instant family city colonies skycity detail
Korean pyeongsang -1㎡ intergenerational space
Post pyeongsang -vertical ground
Post pyeongsang - play garden
People often say: “I was given birth by A and B, but my parents are X and Y.” What this goes to show is that if there is someone that could play specific roles, familial forms could be created without blood family. This is a composition that is often seen in the play of little children. Children create families out of dolls bought on separate occasions and unrelated to each other. A Barbie doll mother, a dinosaur father, and a puppy “me”. Families are created in other different forms. Even if they are not toys of the same manufacturer, even if they are not toys of the same type, they can become family if they were to play different family member roles. So you could say that a family is a type of role-playing game.
In our childhood, we have already experienced temporary yet certain familial forms. I would like to define this form of family that is not bound by blood, discontinued, temporary, bound to end, and newly forming as “instant family”. Instant families are made possible by role-playing games that attribute roles to individuals.
Instant Family is a project that deals with the phenomenon of the death of a city, which is a natural event that follows the death of the human relationship. An instant-family composition resolves the social disconnection.
Epic Data
Epic Street
We establish new complexities and programmatic mixity by fighting against homogeneity, segregation as seen in monocultural, architectural programmes such as shopping cities and town centres that no longer provide a meaningful relationship, for example dead malls and empty office spaces, we think of the city as an archipelago in which the island becomes its defining form and life is contained within it, under the extreme circumstances of our times, we test ecologies where new relationships a single, homogeneous culture without diversity allow social, professional and domestic conflicts in the scale of the building.