Giant blobs and floating parks: Seoul's first architecture biennale shakes up the city

From Zaha Hadid’s bulbous plaza to a ‘library’ of flora planted across a skygarden, the South Korean capital is using its architecture festival to look to the future – and atone for the costly sins of the past

Everything you need to build a nuclear submarine can be found in Sewoon Sangga, or so they used to say. Walking the labyrinthine levels of this concrete megastructure, which sweeps through the centre of Seoul like a convoy of container ships almost a mile long, it’s not hard to believe.

In one of the complex’s open-fronted workshops, a man glides a plasma cutter through a thick steel plate while someone else welds tubes into a cage. On the floors above, between units selling everything from jars of lenses to covert surveillance cameras and refurbished arcade machines, people solder circuit boards. It is a kaleidoscopic cross-section: florists rub shoulders with attorneys, record shops with private security firms, counterfeit Viagra sellers with the HQ of Mr Silver Korea, a competition for ageing bodybuilders.

Designed in the 1960s by Kim Swoo-geun, the country’s leading modernist architect, the complex was conceived as a self-contained universe, providing housing, offices, shops and restaurants, along with a school, hotel, daycare centre and cinema. There is even a library for the building’s residents, as well as churches of different denominations and elevated playgrounds, all hovering above a base of manufacturing that fizzes like an alchemist’s laboratory.

“A vessel floating in the vast ocean called Seoul,” is how Kim described it, and it soon became home to its fair share of pirates peddling porn and knock-off records. Illicit activities thrived, the stigma grew, and Sewoon Sangga – which means “Erecting Good Energy” – was frequently voted the ugliest building in the city, its raw concrete frame subjected to a number of ill-advised cladding refits over the years. Successive mayors tried to have it demolished and replaced with gleaming glass towers, a fate only prevented by the presence of the nearby Jongmyo shrine, a Unesco world heritage site.

“It was an act of great violence against the city,” says Chang Yong-soon, one of the architects who has been working to breathe new life into the behemoth and stitch it back into the surrounding streets. “It erased a fabric of alleys and ruptured this part of Seoul.”

The project has brought back the elevated bridges that were torn down, thereby reconnecting the structure’s two halves. New studios and retail units have been inserted along the pedestrian walkways, making them more like two-sided high streets rather than lonely strips. A handsome new sloping piazza has been built to the north, to draw people up from the street. And, building on the maker culture of the place, a robotics lab has been installed in the basement boiler room, where 3D printers and robotic arms conjure mysterious forms from clay.

The unlikely rebirth of Sewoon Sangga is one of the “live projects” of the first Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. “We wanted to instigate projects that could extend beyond the life of the biennale,” says Hyungmin Pai, curator of the inaugural festival. “There are over 200 biennales already, so we had to do something different. We see it as a kind of experimental laboratory of urban governance, not just for Seoul, but for cities around the world.”

The emphasis is on manufacturing, a timely topic given that such space is being driven out of urban centres across the globe by the march of speculative housing. Few cities provide such a vivid picture of urban industry as Seoul. A little to the east of the tech and electronics hub of Sewoon lies the district of Dongdaemun, a hive of multistorey fashion malls and 24-hour fabric markets, feeding a sprawling network of garment workshops to the north.

“The street is like a linear production line,” says architect and curator Yerin Kang, as we walk past people pattern-cutting, sewing, finishing, ironing, each stage passing on to the next in a 24-hour cycle. But it’s not as busy as it once was: businesses here are losing out to cut-price workshops in China. It is here that the biennale has intervened – in the form of a bright turquoise shopfront, signalling the arrival of a new studio space for young fashion designers, right in the midst of the makers.

“The businesses here mostly make copies of famous brands,” says Kang. “We want to get young designers to inspire the fabricators to do something different, injecting new energy into the area.” A range of experimental garments dangle above the desks inside, their intricacy demonstrating the range of skills on this one street alone.

One of the biennale’s two flagship exhibitions is staged nearby, inside the bulbous silver spaceship of Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza, a $450m leviathan that landed here in 2014. The curators have pulled no punches in letting the impact of this big white elephant – a vanity project of the previous mayor – speak for itself.

“When I see this thing, I think the city has created a monster,” says street vendor Woojong Suk, in a video shown in the exhibition. Her business was displaced by the arrival of the big blob, which swept away a lively market that used to operate from a former stadium. “No one knows what it is for. The city spent all this money, but they never explained how they would use the building.”

The sloping floors and walls of this loosely defined exhibition space have proved a nightmare for the curators as well, but they’ve done a decent job of showing an engaging range of case studies from cities around the world. London’s contribution, intelligently put together by young architects We Made That, looks at the Barbican theatre, tracing the intricate networks involved in putting on a production. Other topics range from food logistics in São Paulo to co-housing in San Francisco, and the immaculate recreation of an aspirational apartment in Pyongyang, North Korea, complete with gold lace curtains and a velour three-piece suite. It is an illuminating selection, but a sharper focus would have helped draw parallels between the issues facing these divergent locations.

The other main exhibition is found across town at Donuimun Village, a dense muddle of historic buildings and winding alleyways that was slated for demolition, but has been saved and refurbished as a biennale initiative. The charming maze has been taken over by a series of conceptual installations curated by Spanish architect Alejandro Zaera-Polo, looking at everything from how sensors perceive the city to how mushroom mycelium can be used to grow structural components. A lot of it falls into the category of bad installation art with a whiff of academia.

The true power of what the Seoul biennale might be is found less in the content of these exhibitions than in the wider role it can perform for the city. “We conceived it as a way of discussing urban issues with the citizens of Seoul,” says Kim Young-Joon, the city’s chief architect. “It can’t just be a discussion among experts, like most biennales. It should be a vehicle for discussing the future of Seoul and testing ideas. We have been spending a lot of time protesting about politics, but not about architecture and the environment. The general public awareness is not there yet.”

Kim took over from Seung H-Sang, who launched the role of city architect with initiatives that signalled a radical shift away from the trophy projects of the previous administrations. The tacky baubles of the last two mayors can be seen all across the city. Oh Se-hoon, in power from 2006 to 2010, was something of a magpie: he decorated Seoul with shiny trinkets, from Hadid’s silver UFO to a cluster of lumpen metallic entertainment buildings that float in the river like discarded ornaments.

Before him, Lee “The Bulldozer” Myung-bak made a great show of ripping down an elevated highway and “opening up” the Cheonggyecheon stream beneath. But rather than use the natural watercourse, he installedpumps that circulate the water and keep the current flowing, at a cost of $2m a year. Once again, local traders and workshops were displaced in the process of cleaning up the area.

“Our focus has been different,” says Seung. “We are more concerned with the spaces between buildings and the missing links from a pedestrian point of view.” Their first major project opened this summer: Seoullo 7017 – aka Skygarden – the transformation of a 1km flyover into a planted pedestrian bridge, designed by Dutch architects MVRDV. Comparisons with New York’s High Line are inevitable, but this is a very different creature. It is not a park or tourist attraction, but an essential piece of connective tissue, crossing a gulf of railway lines and eight-lane highways that have made this area impossible to navigate. Its curving ramps sweep down to surrounding streets like the tendrils of a creeper, luring people up to a lush “library” of Korean flora, planted alphabetically by species.

In a rare example of architects in power, Kim heads a team of 60 designers and planners in city hall, now working on over 100 projects – from what to do with tracts of land along the railway lines, to the transformation of an urban quarry into a new outdoor performance space. these may form topics for future iterations of the biennale. If the two-month festival can be employed as a form of live consultation, a catalyst for a broad public conversation on the future of the city, then it will be a model that many such festivals of architecture, including London’s, would do well to learn from.