Chris Malcolm - Architecture & Urban Works

Binary City

year: 2013

Location: Paju, South Korea

advisor: Anton Garcia Abril & Kim Young-Joon

collaborators: Eric Randall Morris

description: Following the trend of moving Industry out of the hyper populated Seoul and into the rural agricultural landscape of Paju (Directly north of Seoul), this project seeked to develop the third city in the sequence--Newly created book city (Paju I), and underway film city (Paju II) have set precedents as satellite cities for their aforementioned industries. The third (Paju III) is proposed as digital city, a city for samsung and the booming tech world, with an interesting restraint of only developing 15% of the agricultural land as Urban, and leaving the rest at rice fields.

The question for the project became "How does one live in the digital city". Our proposal was one of a progression of extremes, to think of a digital or future city, we thought of the inclusiveness of everything rather than leaving the past or future behind. We include hyper density at one end, and super low sprawl on the other, with a gradient of zones in-between. To live in a future city, we embraced the AND condition, denying the OR.

To have a city that has it all and then some is our portrayal of the digital city--we may want to work in hyper consolidated towers but live and play in a more low dense city, or vice versa. The digital city accommodates both, and the transformative hybrid between.

The task was then to translate the idea of a city as a gradient into a physicality, typologies, and rule sets.

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