ULSAN REMADE: Manufacturing the Modern Industrial City

The Spring 2017 option studio “ULSAN REMADE: Manufacturing the Modern Industrial City” worked with the presence of the ‘Fifth Industrial Revolution,’ a current systematic transformation combining accelerated and automated methods of manufacture and industrial production. This transformation features changes to local patterns of energy, resource consumption and expenditures (a post-oil future), labor organizations, civil infrastructure, and new innovative urban landscape spaces resulting in a critical rethinking of the basic relationship of modern industry and the city. Ulsan, Korea is a city landscape focused for the next 10-15 years on envisioning a low carbon future replacing its dependence on oil and fossil fuel with local renewable energy resources and industrial by-product exchanges that will replace traditional forms of energy consumption. This is all set within a quite contradictory regional landscape of heroic proportions featuring a natural environment of mountains, grass meadows, a jagged coastline and long stretches of black pebble beaches.

The studio reconsidered 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 domestic and civic environments of energy, waste, and metabolism.

Curated by Niall Kirkwood, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology, and Sang Yong Cho (MLA ’14).