Crow’s Eye view

Winner of the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Bienniale, Korea's Crow's Eye view takes inspiration from the title of a poem by poet-architect Korean Yi Sang (1910-37). It symbolises the fragmented vision born out of an awareness of the impossibility of a unitary model of modernity for Korea, divided and thus never universal.

The project by Minsuk Cho and MASS Studies, commissioner and curator respectively, displayed inside the last pavilion to be built at the Giardini (in 1995, Seok Chul Kim and Franco Mancuso) responds to the theme “Absorbing Modernity” proposed by Koolhaas, with a story in four parts: “Reconstruction Life”, “Monumental State”, “Utopian Tours: the Nick Bonner Collection”, “Borders”. Each describes the complex and contradictory way that modernity has been interpreted since the Second World War in relation to a land and a people that was split in two.

With the monumental rhetoric of modernism with a socialist stamp, gigantism (seen in the large model of the 1.2 km long multi-functional building conceived for evacuation in the event of bombardment that then become a modern urban shell to rethink), autarchy, the star-system (the figure of the architect Kim Swoo-Geon) and western International style, Korean experienced modernity in a contradictory and often tangential fashion in which Seul and Pyongyang, despite being so diverse, end up resembling one another.

The heterogenous exhibition material (photographs, architectural models, drawings, prints, videos, illustrations and maps) forms a 'collection' of objects that effectively describe the rich complexity of the process of modernisation that has affected this country.

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Korea Pavilion
Crow’s Eye view
Commissioner: Minsuk Cho
Curator: MASS Studies

Until 23 November 2014
14. Biennale di Architettura
Fundamentals
Giardini di Castello, Venice