Welcome to the Vertical Village
Exhibition in Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, S. Korea (20 June- 7 October 2012)
‘Welcome to the Vertical Village’ exhibition opened at Total Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul. In the exhibition visitors walk through a giant model of a possible Vertical Village to experience its spatial richness and three dimensionality. The show was open to public between June 20 and October 7 and features films, an outdoor sculpture and a giant vertical village made of more than 700 objects.
Under the title “Welcome to the Vertical Village” the exhibition explored the rapid urban transformation in East Asia, the qualities of urban villages and the potential to realise this in a much denser, vertical way as a radical alternative to the monotonous block architecture with identical standard apartments and its consequences for the city. The exhibition consists of analytical research, various movies, a documentary and animations, two software packages and a 3 meter tall sculpture of a possible Vertical Village developed by MVRDV and The Why Factory. Visitors can design their ideal house and compose their own Vertical Village with parametric software.
Total Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA) in Seoul had invited MVRDV, The Why Factory and JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture to move the Vertical Village exhibition to Seoul. The exhibition was developed as a large installation. Visitors experienced a walk through a large 1:15 scale model of a vertical village composed of more than 700 objects, turning the museum into a Vertical Village itself.
Outside a model of the Vertical Village was exhibited, which after the show would be shown permanently as a piece or public art at a small plaza in the city centre which is surrounded by grey monolithic buildings, emphasising the quality of the urban village even more.