It’s unusual for an architect to be approached to design a theme park. In fact, the original commission called for a museum. Ssamzie Corporation approached us for a couple of buildings in a three-way collaboration with another architect in the U.S., but we ended up choosing the Dalki project, which was originally supposed to be a museum.
The reason they initially asked us to do a museum is that the client is a well-known fashion company that is sometimes described as the Korean version of Benetton because they are closely associated with the art world and have a tendency to promote themselves with rather shocking advertising campaigns. They are very involved in the art marketing business and have a big collection, which is why they originally asked us to design a contemporary art space. But their interests are diversified - they also have branches in the music and youth culture industries. When they realised the incredible abundance of art galleries which had already been planned for the Heyri Art Valley complex, they began to examine other options. After a couple of weeks they came back to us and told us there had been a change of plans, and that they wanted to build a theme park for children based on a character from their cartoon business. I think they also felt this would be more economically feasible.
Looking back, it was a clever decision because it really worked. The building undoubtedly triggered the interest of the public and it became a focal point within the community. I remember the beginning was rather awkward because they presented us with an in-house feasibility study which suggested turning this relatively small site (about 3,000 sqm) into a sort of Disneyesque park with a European castle and artificial landscape features.
The context of the Dalki Theme Park project is the Heyri Art Valley development. The masterplan takes five existing hills as its starting point and form generator, but to some extent nature is the recurring theme rather than a factual presence. Although the defining programme of the development is cultural, the community that inhabits it is attracted by ideas such as ecology, nature and farming - basically, how things are grown. For example, the theme park’s main character is named Dalki (Korean for “strawberry”) and she lives in a fruit patch. But there’s a strong sense of shameless artificiality in all this – one must remember we’re just outside Seoul.
The setting of the Pixel House is similar to that of the Dalki Theme Park – it is also part of the Heyri Art Valley complex. But in a way the contrast couldn’t be greater: the theme park is the second largest building in the development, while the Pixel House is so far the smallest of the 390 lots. The client is a couple fervently inspired by socialist ideals and are very critical of the public education system in Korea. Their intention is to run a home-schooling venture from their house. During the day their home is a kind of “living room” for the community, a place to drop one’s children off on the way to work. In the evening the building’s function reverts from public to private, once again becoming the family’s own home. We actually drew a mini-masterplan for this site. As the project develops, two small additional constructions will be added to allow more room for schooling activities.
Speaking of the similarities and differences between the two projects, I think their defining feature is a kind of intimacy and fantastical child-like light-heartedness. They both seem to have the qualities of small stuffed animals – you somehow want to pet them or play with them, and this establishes an interesting relationship with the cultural context of the city. Wandering around Seoul I’m fascinated by the general obsession with the medium of the cartoon: in the West, adults obsessed with cartoons would somehow conjure up notions of a stunted growth, of a culture somehow congealed in its adolescence, whereas here they appear to permeate Korean society at every level. Generally speaking, there seems to be an interest in undermining modernism by playing with it – a degree of irreverence that from a traditional standpoint might elsewhere be considered perversity. I think these two projects are emblematic, on very different scales, of a nascent interest in subverting the conventions of architectural production in contemporary Korea. If you look at the other projects on this site they are generally very serious, sober and international. The feature that interests me the most is the way Dalki Theme Park and Pixel House fold the popular cultural influences of nearby Seoul into the specific local context of this “archi-valley”. Instead of complying with the masterplan, these two buildings react to it, achieving its goals without reverting to the default language of iconic modernism.
These projects were also an interesting opportunity to experiment with very diverse types of public space. One is a private home inspired by a socialist ideal of openness, to the extent that it can be used as a school, while the other engages the notion of public space from a commercial standpoint.
Yes, it’s ironic that although its programme is commercial it has become the most public building in the development.
One could describe the Dalki Theme Park as fluctuating between “eco” and “logo”: on the one hand it is a landscape project, committed to and to some extent permeated by its natural context, which is presented as “authentic”; on the other, it yields unapologetically to those commercial strategies of seduction that have invaded the realms of even the youngest children.
That’s an interesting point. When we were given the AIA award, there was a bit of controversy because some people felt we should be making excuses for the fact that it is a commercial building. But my feeling is that this combination of a commercial programme with public functionality is one of the building’s primary qualities. The fact is that it demonstrates the potential for architecture to engage and influence this kind of typology. Whether or not you think public spaces being tainted by commercial interests is a good thing, it remains a fact and so you must ask yourself whether you want to make them more public and more open or whether you want to make them more controlled.
In a way it’s understandable that Korea should become the testbed for this highly contemporary debate. It’s a country where something like 80 per cent of the buildings were built in the last 30 years.
Yes. And it also seems to pose another question: what is Korea currently offering the international scene in terms of urbanism? I was really stunned by the development of certain new cities, because in the West not many could take a theme park as a serious endeavour, yet you arrive in Korea and find proposals for new cities designed as theme parks (which, incidentally, is originally a western typology) designed and implemented with as much attention as any other part of the urban infrastructure. Or you find a city, such as Paju Book City, based on the theme of intellectualism of a book culture. So if you consider the new ideas which are now emerging onto this scene as sites offering new ways of investigating ecology, for example, or how to revitalize the notion of community, there is the potential for public spaces to become the backbone for a new kind of urbanism quite distinct from the typologies emerging in the West. So even something that is quite obviously kitsch might in fact hold the key to a very new reality for urbanism.