Seoul: Of Islands and Megastructures (Built Environment City Studies)

This book focuses on understanding how a megacity like Seoul can be read as a formal architectural composition and not an endless urban sprawl. In a broader sense, the book discusses the dichotomy between city and urbanization: “city” being an architectural problem of bounded forms, while “urbanism” is an infrastructural project of expansion.It is an uncontested reality that urbanization is a continuous global process that has produced nebulous conurbations labeled as megacities.These expand beyond the virtual administrative boundary of any said “city,” producing a discrepancy between an area of administrative control and the real physical condition of human settlement.If there were a better formal understanding of megacities through their typological architectural conditions, then there could be a better assessment of the qualitative state of urbanization.Avant-garde groups from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s such as Team X, the Situationist, the Structuralist, and the Metabolist worked