Alessandro Mendini, 2007

It is clear that within the aggregate of the world’s geo-political and geo-economic picture, the Yellow Sea has progressively taken on a strong and articulate identity. Its territorial size, number of cities and growing urban developments are comparable to those of the European Union. Its geographical whole assumes logic when seen and approached as a synthesized and synergetic project. Anthropological traditions encourage this type of approach, whose optimization can be obtained by placing cultural values before economic ones. As its center, the sum of these cultures looks to Seoul, or rather Incheon, the giant urban development planned between the airport and Seoul. So besides having the largest and the best equipped airport of the Yellow Sea, the city of Incheon is becoming characterized by having and planning great bridges, subway lines and highways that provide speedy connections with Seoul. Incheon also has a highly modern commercial port and developed networks of commerce, technology and services.
Architect Seok Chul Kim and his Archiban studio have long been committed to the studying of theories and design projects, supported by political and municipal administrators, to give an image and architectural substance to this vision. The idea and main economic incentive with which to promote and ignite the motor of the area, is that of building a trade show center based on Milan’s operational model and collaborating directly with the Fiera di Milano. The size of the respective contexts and the characteristics of the respective types of industries justify this comparison. Kim has studied this subject in depth, which has included a collaboration with Atelier Mendini.
He has inserted and integrated the Trade Show Center of Incheon in an urban construction- and traffic-related plan that comprises a tourism harbor, offices, housing, multifunctional buildings and other urban elements. The effect is the creation of a micro-city that is a satellite to the monumental Trade Show Center. The micro-city has the typical shape of the urban utopias that Kim has been working on for many years, in a hypothesis of circular forms that are part earth and part water. For Incheon, the city’s shape is surrounded by a wide and suggestive canal that serves the purpose of tide control. This spatial and geometric territory is permeated with symbols and colors that connect it to tradition and science fiction at once. It comes across like a piece of Land Art. If on one hand the Yellow Sea area has the typical informally spotted appearance of a new megalopolis, on a smaller scale Kim’s circles and rings give an urban, cultured and human sense to the size of the city that is experienced, with an agile connection between the locations of the eastern city and those of the western city. In Kim’s architectural hypothesis, the parallelism between Milan and Incheon is perfectly logical and motivated. It is also the fruit of knowledge developed during years of teaching at the University of Venice.
Seok Chul Kim’s vocation is an articulate one, one that looks at the world from above, inventing the shapes of the city from precisely that position. His vision is as vast as those of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, with the same drive to structure the territory with extremely recognizable, large urban signs. With an ecumenical architectural culture that expresses both East and West, professor Kim imagines and realizes utopias that originate in the depths of history and project towards the urban future.

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