Ulsan Remade: Manufacturing the Modern Industrial Landscape

This studio will reconsider the City of Ulsan, Republic of Korea’s prime industrial and manufacturing center as part of a more livable and sustainable metropolitan industrial landscape and a locale of shifting local and global economies and inventive environments addressing energy, waste and metabolism. In particular the studio will work with the presence of the so-named "Fourth Korean Industrial Revolution," a systematic transformation in contemporary Korea combining new methods of manufacture and making with changes to resources, governance structures, civil society, human identity and the meaning of nature at two scales of operation — that of planning  the Ulsan Industrial District for a post-oil economy in relation to the city and secondly at the design project scale of industrial ecology, landfill land and resource/energy use in and around the industrial district and city. A field trip to the city of Ulsan, Korea will take place at the mid-point of the semester. Studio members will also have an opportunity throughout the semester to investigate traditional and contemporary Korean planning, design, culture and technology through a series of lectures and workshops with The Korea Institute at Harvard University, the University of Ulsan and by the studio instructors and invited guests.

Background: The Modern Industrial City:
Ulsan (officially the Ulsan Metropolitan City) is Korea's seventh largest metropolis with a population of over 1.1 million. It is located in the southeast of the country and is the industrial center of Korea, forming the heart of the Ulsan Industrial District, which is home to the world's largest automobile assembly plant operated by the Hyundai Motor Company, the world's largest shipyard operated by Hyundai Heavy Industries and the world's second largest oil refinery, owned by SK Energy. The context of the study area is also within a larger natural setting of the Yeongnam Alps and the Ganjeolgot Cape.