Over the past half century, Seoul’s urban development followed a simplified economic logic centered on rapid growth and capitalist expansion, embodying many twentieth-century urban mistakes: car-centric planning, efficiency obsession, and development separated from nature. This logic enabled large-scale transformation but often sacrificed spatial richness, civic generosity, and long-term resilience. The most desirable sites were claimed early, leaving more complex parcels shaped by difficult topographies, fragmented fabric, or infrastructural constraints for public-minded projects. Seoul’s sociopolitical landscape remains in constant flux, with windows for meaningful intervention often narrow and unpredictable. Yet within such constrained conditions, innovation, resilience, and new architectural value most often emerge. What can we design within, against, and through these inherited artifacts?

This studio focuses on the area surrounding the former Danginri Thermal Power Plant, a Han River site now being transformed by Mass Studies into a public cultural venue. By examining both the riverfront and urban edge, students will explore how future extensions might cultivate more inclusive and interconnected cultural spaces for the broader community.

To build where there is almost no ground left is to search for meaning in what remains. The site becomes both constraint and catalyst, asking how architecture might listen, adapt, and grow from existing traces. At this intersection of industrial history, cultural ecosystem, and natural ecology, students must reimagine how architecture can reshape and renew the city’s challenged grounds.

Students will formulate design proposals that interrogate the site’s inherent complexities and layered historical palimpsest. The goal is to articulate new potentials in relation to the urban fabric, the Han River threshold, or their composite interface. Working across a spectrum of operative scales, each project should generate civic dialogue and achieve critical synergy with the existing Danginri development and its broader territorial context.

In late February, the studio will travel to Seoul to visit the Danginri construction site, explore the Han River, Hongdae district, and other relevant locations to support individual proposal development. The midterm review will take place during this period. Minsuk Cho will lead weekly sessions either in person or remotely. Teaching Associate Ryan Otterson will be present in person for all studio sessions. See the course syllabus for details.