ciro najle general design bureau

The boom of high-rise apartment developments in South Korea has been the most powerful device for the transformations that the country has experienced in the past half century and continues to be the ubiquitous architectural medium for the channelling of life-styles and the homogenization of traditional social patterns.

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New high-rise housing types have emerged, with multiple yet superfluous variations in the layouts, and fuelled by an aggressive marketing campaign. Straightforward in their logics, humble in their nature, deceptive in their imagery, flexible in their adaptability to changes, these models are indifferent to any discursive resistance or to a critical position. They do not call for theory and reject mitigating their social and environmental effects. Rather, they call for sophisticated forms of sharpening, aiming at ever higher levels of ubiquity, wider ranges of performance, more exaggerated themes, and new forms of programming. Highrise Housing Holistics takes on this developmental opportunity for the configuration of powerful design instruments and new breeds in the typology.