On the Architecture of Tomorrow
2025. 03. 07.
On what I consider a crisis. Summarized in 10 pages.
Page 0. What Is the Architecture of Tomorrow?
Do we, the ones having this conversation, even understand the architecture of today?
The stories I am about to share are an enumeration of my experiences. The topics may seem somewhat inconsistent, but viewed from a broader perspective, they are all connected to the question of what one should study upon entering an architecture program.
I hope you will keep in mind that these are organized from the perspective that "if space is a platform that mediates people's experiences, then the architect's job is to design spaces and experiences and propose methods for creating them."1)
Previously, I had imagined that "if I were to do a graduation exhibition, I might start with a scenario where a meteor strikes a specific district of Seoul and the city evaporates. ... I would install various servers and data storage devices that could operate even on the devastated land, and through these devices, create virtual spaces where people could gather."2) Had I not taken a leave of absence, I would have held my graduation exhibition in 2019, before COVID had swept the world, when concepts like the metaverse were still unfamiliar. So if I had proposed virtual space as the subject of an architecture graduation exhibition, people would probably have called it experimental. But now, several years later, if someone were to propose the same topic for their graduation exhibition, it might come across as rather cliche. We have reached an era where everyone can understand the idea of building a village in virtual space without needing a setup like a meteor strike.
In short, the architecture of tomorrow that I had been imagining back then became the architecture of today that everyone takes for granted within just a few years. If so, from the current vantage point, how should we imagine the future — spatial experiences, and methods of spatial production? What is the architecture of tomorrow?