AR 131

AR131—Present Tonkin Zulaikha Greer SO-IL Wilkinson Eyre 9 772200 243006 03

$15.95 AUD

Logon Architecture Ta Ta Apartments Under Construction CRAB’s concrete formwork Grieve Gillett / Cox Richardson Adelaide Studios

Spring 2013

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AR131 Architectural Review Asia Pacific Spring 2013

Regulars

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POSTVIEW—AR130 One to Watch—Stewart Hollenstein Sandra Kaji-O’Grady

On Trial / Op-Ed

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Longing For a Greener Present Ross Exo Adams

In Conversation

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Folio More Than ...

Kerstin Thompson

Under Construction

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PREVIEW—AR132 Soheil Abedian School of Architecture, CRAB Chris Knapp

Reviews

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Book Round-up Book Review—Dark Matter and Trojan Horses Anthony Burke

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Book Review—Made in Australia Craig Allchin

Features

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The Working Village Darryl Chen

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A Retroactive Review Richard Weller

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The Hitherto Present Naomi Stead

Projects

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Canberra—National Arboretum Canberra (Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects) Christopher Vernon

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Jiaxing—Ta Ta Apartments (Logon Architecture) Clare Jacobson

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Adelaide—Adelaide Studios (Grieve Gillett / Cox Richardson Architects) Marissa Looby

068 AR has six serial articles appearing in each issue. They can be identified via the icons, both in the magazine and on our website arasiapacific.com.

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Singapore—Cooled Conservatories (Wilkinson Eyre Architects) Fiona Nixon

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Seoul—Kukje Gallery K3 (Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu) Jinyoung Lim

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Melbourne—Precinct Energy Project (PHTR Architects) Leon van Schaik

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F E AT U R E

The Working Village

Left—Along the High Street in the Working Village.

TEXT AND IMAGERY Darryl Chen

A particular instance of the ‘village in the city’ phenomenon in China provides an opportunity to reflect on the idea of the village as an instrument of urbanism, both in China and in the developed west.

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City of villages

London, as established in urban folklore, is a city of villages, a collection of distinct historic settlements that have each grown and been joined together into a single polycentric urban entity. New York too is a city of villages and now Sydney officially joins the ranks of those celebrity cities that have enough urban self-confidence to be associated with what once was reserved for the pastoral, conservative and unsophisticated. The word ‘village’ evokes a cosy insularity that is at once compelling and steadfastly anti-urban. To borrow from Jonathan Meades, real villages are why we live in cities.

The ‘city of villages’ label, while adhering to a limited version of the truth, is inadequate to describe all of the contemporary metropolis’ complexity, contradictions, conflicts and geographical irregularities. In one respect, it is a harmless truism of most places that have grown to encompass neighbouring settlements or that are naturally divided up into distinct communities. At its more duplicitous, the

name is merely a branding device that plays on nostalgia to mask what would otherwise be a brazen commercial proposition (witness the shopping centre as village or the greenfield subdivision as village).

Certainly a return to the local has its positive outcomes. There is obvious merit in the idea that we should each not only be decreasing our carbon footprints, but that those footprints of ours should be located where we stand. However is there something else that is implied with the village that responds to wider social and political concerns? As the spatial products of neoliberal capitalism relentlessly and sometimes exploitatively reconfigure our cities (via its incendiary spatial products of shopping fortress, residential sprawl and privatisation of public space), the urban village offers an alternative. It points to another way of inhabiting our cities, indeed a kind of instrument that addresses both the needs of local actors and the developmental impulse.

China is often cast as a heaving economic juggernaut powered by real estate, with both spectacular and perverse outcomes for urban development. But it is here we see an unlikely example of local purpose combined with economic drive … all set within a village.

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05—Kukje Gallery K3

Location Architect Review Photography

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Seoul, South Korea Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL) Jinyoung Lim Iwan Baan

See U N D E R C O N STRU CTI O N 4 .1 posted on 13 May 2013 at arasiapacific.tumblr.com

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078 PROJECT

01— Chainlink sheet levered into position 02— 1:1 scale mockup testing volume mass 03— Manufacturing fabrication and testing

04— Laying out the chainlink 05— Roof connection for chainlink 06— The angular volume in context

Kukje Gallery K3

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ukje Gallery welcomes its latest iteration, K3, to its burgeoning number of gallery spaces located on the east side road of Gyeongbokgung Palace, South Korea. The Kukje Gallery buildings – named K1, K2 and K3 – are set amongst a plethora of contemporary galleries, with the area fast becoming known as a cultural arts district – stemming back to its inauguration in 1982.

The building’s site is located adjacent to the Hanok district, primarily comprising traditional residential housing native to South Korea. Kukje Gallery is a wellestablished institution and has become synonymous with recognised local and global artists and collectors. It is renowned for promoting the works of established international artists, such as British artists Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor, as well as US artists Cy Twombly and Ed Ruscha.

What began as a small-scale operation has slowly expanded to include additional gallery spaces, the latest of which is Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu’s (SO-IL) K3 gallery.

New York-based practice, SO-IL, faced an overarching predicament at the initiation of the Kukje Gallery K3 project and it came in the form of a question: how to find a way to ‘soft land’ a solid gallery space within the historical context of Joseon Dynasty’s Gyeongbokgung Palace preservation district. Their proposed solution was for ‘deliberate ambiguity’, a phrase used to explain the new gallery building. SO-IL realised this conceptual phrase by providing an ambiguous external drapery and, as such, connecting the exterior space to the interior gallery.

The client brief demanded an evaluation of the relationships between the new and existing gallery spaces, with SO-IL suggesting that they should operate as an ‘art campus’. As SO-IL’s founding partner, Dutch architect Florian Idenburg, states: ‘Kukje Gallery was built closely linked to its neighbouring area. We needed to consider how to fit the buildings in the area, as well as considering each of the individual buildings themselves.’ SO-IL decided on the placement of a small retail store to face building K1, which faces the main street, instituting a connecting door between K1 and K2 to allow for a seamless flow.

Low partitions and a small garden area were then located at the border of building K3 and the surrounding neighbourhood, transforming the small pedestrian street into an open public space. →

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