Seoul runs just behind Mumbai and Lagos in the list of the most dense cities in the world. From a population of 3.5 million in 1965, the city has exceeded 25 million in 2019, hosting 50% of the population in an area of merely 12% of South Korea. The central areas have witnessed the cost of land raising by 680 times since the Korean War, reaching a prohibitive $80,000 per square meter.

This extreme situation in which architects have to operate, design, and build, creates the theoretical basis for ‘The Condition of Seoul Architecture’.

The research insists on the point of view of 18 most innovative South Korean architects, showcasing their projects and analysing their position in the built environment of Seoul, while experts, professors and curators frame urban issues through descriptions of nostalgia for tradition, minimalism and empty spaces. Opportunities arising since the 2008 crisis, the clients has moved on from low-cost drafters to ingenious architects to extend the floor area to the fore, and the traditional concept of façade are adopted to bend the rules of the F.A.R Game.

The result is a ground-breaking, cumulative reckoning teased out through layers of personal accounts and cross-disciplinary research, drawing on architecture, aesthetics, philosophy, politics, and society.

As one of the pavilions of the Cities Exhibition at the Seoul Biennale 2019, the publication pavilion is a collective showcase and a platform for the most recent collection of urban architecture journals, magazines, and publications from multiple cities around the world. The Publication Exhibition also features titles from various participants of the Cities Exhibition thus presenting a condensed version of the Cities Exhibition. In addition, the Publication Exhibition features a special collection from Pier Alessio Rizzardi’s “The Condition of Seoul Architecture” through documentary video, interviews and publications highlighting the city of Seoul where the 2019 Biennale is held. The overall publication exhibition explores the variety of contemporary urban architectural issues and celebrates its projections through printed matter that contains a broad range of research and criticism. The publication pavilion provides a new micro-platform to share thoughts and insights from authors, architects, artists, and students about the Cities Exhibition through selected/featured publications. Also, as an outro exploration of the Cities Exhibition, the publication exhibition extends visitors’ experience and ideas to generate continuous urban architectural discourse about multiple cities during the period of the 2019 Seoul Biennale and beyond.