“Welcome to the Vertical Village” Exhibition opens in Seoul
‘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 by MVRDV and The Why Factory was opened earlier in Taipei and is now in a totally new design at show in Seoul: a city under rapid transformation, the ideal environment to answer to the ‘block attack’ and propose alternatives. The show is 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 explores 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 is developed as a large installation. Visitors experience 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 is exhibited, which after the show will be shown permanently as a piece or public art at a small plaza in the city centre which is surrounded by grey monolithic buildings, emphasizing the quality of the urban village even more.
Equal Books Publishers Seoul publish the Korean edition of ‘the Vertical Village’ catalogue, with added and updated to the English and Chinese edition. The book contains the ample research made comprehensible with countless colour illustrations. It features detailed case studies for Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Djakarta, Tokyo and Bangkok, interviews with Winy Maas, Alfredo Brillemburg and Hubert Klumpner, Lieven De Cauter, Peter Trummer and many others.
The exhibition and publication has been made possible with the generous support of ILJIN, JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture Taipei, Delft University of Technology, The Why Foundation and the Netherlands Architecture Funds.