Crow’s Eye view

Winner of the Golden Lion, the Korean pavilion curated by Minsuk Cho and MASS Studies describes the impossibility of a unitary model of modernity for country split in two.

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.

Crow’s Eye view, Korea Pavilion, Biennale 2014 — Crow’s Eye view, Korea Pavilion, Architecture Biennale, Venice

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.