condenCITY_79 Seoul from above 1.1

The Seoul Metropolitan area is 605 square kilometers (or 233 sq. miles). It's population of 10,464,051 estimated in 2010, is concentrated in an area of 17,288 people per square kilometer (44,770 per square mile); in comparison New York City's density of approximately (27,500 people per square mile) is clear indication of just how dense Seoul is in terms of population per area. From above at night, in this NASA satellite image, we too are reminded of Seoul's defining topographic boundaries and limits, viewed here in its thinly delicate and fragile form (quite opposite the constructed reality at ground level). The cities overflowing edges have been pushed outward and forced through narrowing geographies, north and south, east and west, visible high in the night sky.

condenCITY_78 1912 Se-ul From Above 1.0

Image courtesy nationmaster.com

Seoul has a history of being fictitious when it comes to mapping and representations of the city on paper. Through centuries either locally or by the hand of visiting foreigners (as viewed in the map above) it has been laid out and mapped according to personal perceptions, a kind of visual feeling, rather than by any exactness of measure or precision. It is a representation that permeates even the city today; in its constructed imprecise form.

condenCITY_77 60's seoul Nakwon Sanga

Fall 2011; preservation or preservative? 

condenCITY_76 mullae shadow

Tinged air washed away along rust stained streets. 

open windows accepting what the city has to offer; tempered for a moment by rains torrent.

a lights line connects odd bedfellows in programmatic disharmony. 

casting a final evening glance, I cut through another eves pale twilight of wet grey 

Lost in shadow.

condenCITY_75

Seoul Adaptations

condenCITY_74 From roads to rivers

Image courtesy open source for public use: daum.net

As the rain continues to fall this day, July 28, 2011 the deluge of the last two days has left my home district of Seocho-gu underwater literally. What has officially been classified as a 100 year flooding event on the south side of the city is still unfolding in terms of an urban disaster. Homes washed out as mountainsides have eroded and motorists stranded on the roofs of their vehicles in 1.5m+ deep water, the rains caught many by surprise in the early morning hours on the 27th. With downpours falling in amounts as much as 2.3 inches (6 cm)/ hour it is no surprise that Seoul's drainage systems have been helpless against the torrential summer monsoon.

  

Cy Twombly [April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011] making histories

Coincidentally, it was last week I was posting a note regarding the memory of a great painter I once studied with.  In fact we had great discussions about the man I write of here now. About the same time on July 5th 2011, although I did not know it then, another American painter had just passed away. Cy Twombly wasn't just another painter. I was introduced to his work about 12 years ago as a student. At the time I was challenged by a suggested reference to his work and my budding interests. After some time in 2004, I wrote an article for Loudpaper Zine attempting to draw connections between the fragmented city of Seoul (in its palimpsestial formation) and Twombly's paintings of historical reflectance. 

Today, it is clearer to me as I have contemplated time and again, Twombly's work and the creative processes one ventures into as artist, architect, designer, or creator at will. It has been said that Cy Twombly would paint and draw in light subdued spaces to achieve the loose 'freehand' he was so recognized and known for. It was his "experience" as he once described, when it came to making art that appears form and idea consuming. We are in effect left with the process and depth of making and the significant exposure in that. 

Experience of making above all else, perhaps.  

With each passing, a history is made. Cy Twombly was a master, even during his life, of making histories.

Sussman remembered

'invisible'- e.reeder 2001

"I always use the analogy of a pool that has frozen over," in the words of Wendy Sussman "The finished painting is like that. So, in the pool at the lower depth might be a rock, and then there might be a little leaf that is frozen closer to the surface, and above that maybe a candy wrapper. It's all frozen in the pool, and then on the very top somebody comes and skates. The surface has this history, and that is time, the time of the painting."

More on Sussman here, in her words. 

condenCITY_73 heavy Seoul

My Seoul is heavy. Weighted with materials that connect to earth, the surfaces of the city, and bend precariously to the sky reaching. The architectural forms of Seoul are one with the ground, by the very nature of gravity that pulls at dense material compositions common in many structures throughout the city. There is ambiguity between ground and vertical surface. Where one begins and the other ends is at times unclear. 

condenCITY_72 material Seoul

The Leeum Museum revisited. 

Eclectic Seoul emerges in my return visit (after 4 years) to the Samsung Leeum Museum. Seoul as a city recognizable in its fragmented condition, in refined contrast, the Leeum Museum balances the art of its 'architectures' (designed by Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas, and Mario Botta) and the traditional to contemporary arts contained within. The tightly arranged "campus" of buildings is tucked away in the upscale Hannam-dong residential neighborhood, buried within Seoul's north of the river district. It's material (and formal) presence is precisely Seoul, divergent and un-coreographed yet, somehow for its ambitions, remains contextual within the equally ambitious neighboring villas.