The 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (hereinafter Seoul Biennale) is scheduled to open this September as the main exhibition in Dongdaemun Design Plaza under the theme of Collective City.

The Seoul Biennale will serve as a platform for sharing a wide range experiences of cities around the world through the four exhibitions, Thematic Exhibition, Cities Exhibition, Global Studios and On-site Projects.
Directors Lim Jaeyong and Francisco Sanin insisted on the importance of the theme this year. What is Collective City?

Collective City questions how modes of collective practice and action can challenge the current paradigms of city development and offer resistance to the dominant systems of spatial production. This theme was chosen to make us reflect on new models of co-existence, to suggest alternative concepts of architecture. The biennale makes us realize that architecture has a real political agency.

The Thematic Exhibition is an invitation to reimagine the structure of our cities, a provocation to fundamentally reprioritize, shifting focus from the success of the individual to claim the city as a shared investment.
Participants’ work ranges from critiques on the contemporary processes of urbanization, exploration of ecological and infrastructural systems and questions of material and production, to testing alternative models of development through typological innovation, new forms of tenure and landownership, architecture as a form of mediation and consultation, to expanding and defining new territories.

The potential richness and legacy of the biennale is what can be revealed at the intersection of these conflated scales and practices, to unravel preconceptions within the field and proffer new ontologies as a space of proposition for new forms of existence.

Exhibition Curator: Beth Hughes

Title: 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture & Urbanism
Biennial Website
Organizers: Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Design Foundation
Until November 10, 2019
Address: Seoul, South Korea

Ezio Barbaro © Modemonline