online@offline
City of the bang, 2004 Venice Biennale, 9th International Architecture Exhibition, Korean Culture & Art Foundation
방의도시, 2004베니스비엔날레 제9회 국제건축전 한국관
KIM, Sung Hong, Commissario Aggiunto
Seoul is one of the densest urban centers on the planet. Approximately one quarter of the total population of South Korea, over ten million people, live in the capital city today. The concentration of people in Seoul is much higher than that of neighboring Asian cities, exceeding by three times the density of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore.
Meanwhile, the ratio of Internet users in Korea relative to population is one of the highest in the world. Data shows that 51.5 percent of the total population of South Korea use the Internet, representing the world’s largest penetration rate as of May 2002. In addition, more than 60 percent of South Korean households subscribe to broadband Internet services of 1 megabit per second or higher. About 31 percent of South Korean Internet users now shop online as of May 2002, second only by one percentage point to the United States. The number of mobile phone users has also skyrocketed to more than 30 million, surpassing the number of fixed-line subscribers, set at 22.95 million at the end of March 2002.
Explosive Internet and mobile phone usage coupled with hyper-dense urban conditions within an ethnic and linguistic homogeneity creates a unique urban culture in Korea today. Internet users, so-called “netizens,” enjoy activities via online communities, cyber cafes, or chat rooms in portals and game sites that often turn into offline activities. As of March 2001, about 51 percent of Internet users participate in offline gatherings. The figure was 370 million people, more than eight times the total population of South Korea. One of the most notable examples is iloveschool.co.kr, a leading alumni Web community operator. It literally swept the nation in 2000, sporting a timely combination of cyber communities and alumni associations. An Internet statistics venture firm reported the number of its members to be 9.5 million in October 2001, capturing a leading position among cyber community operators in Korea.
The “city of the bang” is the flip side of the “iloveschool syndrome.” Koreans do not simply retreat from the public to these privatized milieus, but use these places to relieve their fear of alienation by constantly reconfirming their sense of relatedness, which Emile Durkheim called “mechanical solidarity.” Mechanical solidarity works by categorical similarities among individuals. The group is defined by the abstract bonds of members regardless of spatial proximity, and by conceptual cohesion rather than spatial contiguity. This transpatial group tends to have a strong control on boundaries and a strong internal organization to maintain an essentially conceptual form of solidarity. The city of the bang absorbs these seemingly heterogeneous but exclusive socio-cultural networks into its urban fabric.
The bang is a spatialization of transpatial mechanical solidarity in Korean society, but the city of the bang does not have any coherent planning logic or principle. Its distribution is ubiquitous but random. In a city controlled by strong aristocratic power with a highly hierarchical social structure, the bang receded from the main street and was placed inside the block as a walled segment in a domestic space. The horizontal juxtaposition inscribed a division between the upper and the lower ranks of society by commanding the privileged space while consigning merchants to an extremely limited territory adjacent to, but never within the sacred area.
In the process of transformation from the aristocratic center to the commercial hub, there has been a reversal in spatial logic: the most privileged residential area with an inside-planar configuration was overpowered by the commercial area with an outside-linear configuration. The pressure of spatial intensification entails uneven development: the peripheral verticalization is coupled with the degradation of the inside of the block. Inside, there are one-story traditional houses turned into inexpensive inns, drinking places and other nighttime entertainment facilities. Outside, the multi-story retail and commercial structures that range in height from two to five stories dominate.
The bang has infiltrated the vertical spread profiles of commercial city spaces. The secular and the ecclesiastical can be contained in a single building: a Norae bang in the basement, a fast food restaurant on the 1st floor, a PC bang on the 2nd, a plastic surgery clinic on the 3rd, a commercial learning institute on the 4th, a church on the 5th floor, etc. The layering of these spaces, of which the bang is a major part, functions to conceal irregularities of urban fabric behind the street. And while the chaotic signboards attached to the external walls represent extremely dense but random spatial configurations inside, they do not really reveal the way in which the buildings are perceived, conceived and inhabited.
The city of the bang mocks both the obsession of the holistic conception of modern urban planning and purely autonomous architectural objects. It fundamentally questions the role of architecture and urbanism. It blurs the borders between the domestic and the commercial; private and public; banal and ritualistic, and mundane and sacred. There is no typology of the bang, but only its mutants.
Guy Debord once said “the spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.” The city of the bang spectacles the separate, but spectacles it as separate.
The two papers were modified for “City of the bang,” the theme of the Korea Pavilion of the Ninth Architecture Biennial of Venice 2004. The first paper was originally presented at the 8th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, (Un) Bounding Tradition: The Tensions of Borders and Regions, with the title, “From Online to Offline: The Emergence of a New Urban Community In the Age of Information Technology,” Hong Kong, December 12 -15. The second paper was originally published at the proceedings of the Space Syntax 3rd International Symposium with the title, “The Linear and the Planar: The Spatial Logic of Chongno and the Morphology of its Commercial Architecture,” Atlanta, 2001, pp.33.1-33.12.
City of the bang, 2004 Venice Biennale, 9th International Architecture Exhibition, Korean Culture & Art Foundation
방의도시, 2004베니스비엔날레 제9회 국제건축전 한국관
KIM, Sung Hong, Commissario Aggiunto
Seoul is one of the densest urban centers on the planet. Approximately one quarter of the total population of South Korea, over ten million people, live in the capital city today. The concentration of people in Seoul is much higher than that of neighboring Asian cities, exceeding by three times the density of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore.
Meanwhile, the ratio of Internet users in Korea relative to population is one of the highest in the world. Data shows that 51.5 percent of the total population of South Korea use the Internet, representing the world’s largest penetration rate as of May 2002. In addition, more than 60 percent of South Korean households subscribe to broadband Internet services of 1 megabit per second or higher. About 31 percent of South Korean Internet users now shop online as of May 2002, second only by one percentage point to the United States. The number of mobile phone users has also skyrocketed to more than 30 million, surpassing the number of fixed-line subscribers, set at 22.95 million at the end of March 2002.
Explosive Internet and mobile phone usage coupled with hyper-dense urban conditions within an ethnic and linguistic homogeneity creates a unique urban culture in Korea today. Internet users, so-called “netizens,” enjoy activities via online communities, cyber cafes, or chat rooms in portals and game sites that often turn into offline activities. As of March 2001, about 51 percent of Internet users participate in offline gatherings. The figure was 370 million people, more than eight times the total population of South Korea. One of the most notable examples is iloveschool.co.kr, a leading alumni Web community operator. It literally swept the nation in 2000, sporting a timely combination of cyber communities and alumni associations. An Internet statistics venture firm reported the number of its members to be 9.5 million in October 2001, capturing a leading position among cyber community operators in Korea.
The “city of the bang” is the flip side of the “iloveschool syndrome.” Koreans do not simply retreat from the public to these privatized milieus, but use these places to relieve their fear of alienation by constantly reconfirming their sense of relatedness, which Emile Durkheim called “mechanical solidarity.” Mechanical solidarity works by categorical similarities among individuals. The group is defined by the abstract bonds of members regardless of spatial proximity, and by conceptual cohesion rather than spatial contiguity. This transpatial group tends to have a strong control on boundaries and a strong internal organization to maintain an essentially conceptual form of solidarity. The city of the bang absorbs these seemingly heterogeneous but exclusive socio-cultural networks into its urban fabric.
The bang is a spatialization of transpatial mechanical solidarity in Korean society, but the city of the bang does not have any coherent planning logic or principle. Its distribution is ubiquitous but random. In a city controlled by strong aristocratic power with a highly hierarchical social structure, the bang receded from the main street and was placed inside the block as a walled segment in a domestic space. The horizontal juxtaposition inscribed a division between the upper and the lower ranks of society by commanding the privileged space while consigning merchants to an extremely limited territory adjacent to, but never within the sacred area.
In the process of transformation from the aristocratic center to the commercial hub, there has been a reversal in spatial logic: the most privileged residential area with an inside-planar configuration was overpowered by the commercial area with an outside-linear configuration. The pressure of spatial intensification entails uneven development: the peripheral verticalization is coupled with the degradation of the inside of the block. Inside, there are one-story traditional houses turned into inexpensive inns, drinking places and other nighttime entertainment facilities. Outside, the multi-story retail and commercial structures that range in height from two to five stories dominate.
The bang has infiltrated the vertical spread profiles of commercial city spaces. The secular and the ecclesiastical can be contained in a single building: a Norae bang in the basement, a fast food restaurant on the 1st floor, a PC bang on the 2nd, a plastic surgery clinic on the 3rd, a commercial learning institute on the 4th, a church on the 5th floor, etc. The layering of these spaces, of which the bang is a major part, functions to conceal irregularities of urban fabric behind the street. And while the chaotic signboards attached to the external walls represent extremely dense but random spatial configurations inside, they do not really reveal the way in which the buildings are perceived, conceived and inhabited.
The city of the bang mocks both the obsession of the holistic conception of modern urban planning and purely autonomous architectural objects. It fundamentally questions the role of architecture and urbanism. It blurs the borders between the domestic and the commercial; private and public; banal and ritualistic, and mundane and sacred. There is no typology of the bang, but only its mutants.
Guy Debord once said “the spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.” The city of the bang spectacles the separate, but spectacles it as separate.
The two papers were modified for “City of the bang,” the theme of the Korea Pavilion of the Ninth Architecture Biennial of Venice 2004. The first paper was originally presented at the 8th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, (Un) Bounding Tradition: The Tensions of Borders and Regions, with the title, “From Online to Offline: The Emergence of a New Urban Community In the Age of Information Technology,” Hong Kong, December 12 -15. The second paper was originally published at the proceedings of the Space Syntax 3rd International Symposium with the title, “The Linear and the Planar: The Spatial Logic of Chongno and the Morphology of its Commercial Architecture,” Atlanta, 2001, pp.33.1-33.12.
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