MVRDV wins Gwanggyo City Centre Competition, near Seoul, South Korea

The Daewoo Consortium and the municipality of Gwanggyo announced the MVRDV concept design for a dense city centre winner of the developer’s competition for the future new town of Gwanggyo, located 35km south of the Korean capital Seoul. The plan consists of a series of overgrown hill shaped buildings with great programmatic diversity, aiming for high urban density and encouragement of further developments around this so-called ”˜Power Centre’, one of the envisioned two centre’s of the future new town.

The future of architecture (and maybe is its end) is resolving the urban and nature split. Many years ago, Oparin, a brilliant Soviet biochemist, insisted that no real line existed between the organic and the inorganic, the dead and the living. All of the behaviors of a rock could be found in a fly or a bird. For Oparin, it was not a matter of being and not being but of intensity—fast/slow, cool/hot, dark/light. This fundamental continuity from the lifeless to the living is now what is being expressed in the new urbanism.