seoul biennale
MEMORIAL TO THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Conceived and designed:
CSK ARCHITECTS AND THE BARTLETT UCL WITH ARUP
Matthew Barnett Howland and Oliver Wilton with Andrew Lawrence
Sponsored:
and part-funded by the UCL EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account
Pre-assembled in Portugal:
Assembled in Seoul:
Thanks to:
Carlos Manuel and all at the Vendas Novas factory
Andrew Lawrence, Arup
Andrea Melis, CSK Architects
Pedro Clarke A+Architecture, Lisbon
This temporary monument is a memorial to a period of recent history that witnessed enormous technological progress and industrial development, and yet at the same time has ended in an ecological crisis of global proportions. Therefore the installation is designed on the one hand to commemorate the incredible achievements of this period of modernisation, but on the other hand it also declares the necessity to mark the death of the ‘late modern period’, and its environmentally destructive linear modes of production, consumption and inhabitation.
In this sense, the installation is a space in which to rethink our relationship to the ecosystems that support us, and to reflect on this decisive contemporary moment with the benefit of historical perspective – from an organic economy constrained by photosynthesis, to the potential unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and its intensive extraction of fossil fuels, and now almost back again to the possibility of a world powered entirely by renewable forms of energy.
The non-linear nature of these historical relationships is mirrored in the new and yet familiar form of the proposal, in which the tectonic logic of an innovative plantbased building system evokes the ancient forms of dry-stone construction that can be found in many cultures around the world. The resultant pyramidal form is also a playful take on the European architectural heritage of monuments and memorials.
The memorial is designed with a resource life cycle that challenges the ‘take-make-waste’ extractive industrial model that was typical of the period it commemorates. Expanded cork blocks are a pure plant-based material that originates from a biodiverse landscape; blocks are assembled without mortar or glue using interlocking timber and metal components, all of which can be disassembled at the end of the building’s life; at which point the blocks can be reconfigured to create another small building; and once they eventually drop out of the ‘technical sphere’, they can be returned directly to the ‘biological sphere’ to decompose and generate new growth.
As a result, the installation is a re-useable and biodegradable monument with which to mark the end of an era, as well as an architectural symbol of the way in which we might want our built environments to relate to natural ecosystems in the next.