2005
ACC.ONE.CITY
SIZE  L
PROGRAM  CULTURE
LOCATION  GWANGJU
CLIENT  ASIA CULTURAL CENTER
YEAR  2005

The competition brief called for designing a complex which manufactures culture. The project started from problematization of this brief. The Asian Culture Complex should be a place where new culture is emerged, rather than manufactured by institutions. Emergence can be achieved by maximizing social contacts, in other words, network complexity. As an urban strategy, differentiation of the whole site into smaller parts is executed by continuing existing and neighboring urban fabric, further being transformed by programmatic interpretations. Then the parts are connected with each other according to specific relationships between sub-programs, forming a 3D complex of nested networks. Two distinct network organizations get emerged out of it; programmatic network (shopping, eating & drinking, learning, conferencing, showing & playing, working and living) and ecological network (park, water and wind). The interest is in generating urban capability of producing a flexible system that is dynamically adaptable, a creative system that can adjust itself freely to temporal events and urban challenges. The differentiated connectivity of each network plays a vital role in modulating its emergent system. The question of what is culture and what is Asian will be constantly redefined and re-generated by means of this new urban system.