2024, Vol.72, No.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.81

pISSN : 1229-0246
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ksasa

This article explores the aesthetic dimension of contemporary South Korean urbanism by reading suspended judgment and formal analysis, which could generate a new way of seeing the city. Suspended judgment means ways of relating oneself to given situations without being preoccupied with prior knowledge or conventions, thereby prompting an openness towards the external world. With the claim that such a concept is crucial in rereading the historiographies of 20th-century architecture and urbanism, this paper aims to conduct the following. The first is to critically review Aron Vinegar’s I am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (2008), which entails an in-depth analysis of Learning from Las Vegas (1972), the classic text on postmodern architecture. And, the second is to expand Vinegar’s book in the context of Korean urbanism to conduct a case study on Choi Jeong Hwa’s 2006 installation entitled Anybody, Anything, Anyway. It is a work the artist installed a number of discarded commercial banners in the Arco Art Center (1979) designed by Kim Swoo-geun. This article claims that, despite the authenticity inherent in Kim’s architectural work, the installation prompts an urban atmosphere that is at once familiar and idiosyncratic in positive senses. It also brings forth a sense of community that is fragmentary and ephemeral, as well as one that mediates given aesthetic criteria and thus releases an assemblage in which both private affects and public discourses coexist.

American architect and theorist Michael Young distinguishes three different responses of architecture to the overwhelming digital image culture that saturates the internet space. These three are the Ethical Response, the Epistemological Response, and the Aesthetic Response. The first two implicitly represent the strategies that contemporary architecture has adopted so far, while the third is an alternative that is proposed as a unprecedented solution to overcome the previous responses. These three responses, proposed only for digital image culture, can help us to understand the traces of contemporary architecture in general, which has struggled to respond to evolving technologies and the social system itself. Based on this idea, this article attempts to broaden the implications of Young’s essay to contemporary architecture in general. In particular, it investigates Korean ethical architecture and the trend of phenomenological architecture, as well as the methodological structures of diagrammatic architecture and Parametricism. Based on the absence of an aesthetic response, a point implied by the structure of his essay, this article attempts to capture aesthetic absence in the major methodologies of contemporary architecture. This, coupled with the limitations of ethical and epistemological responses, guides the possibility of architecture creating a new aesthetic phenomenon in our time.

This paper examines the meaning of Le Corbusier’s synthesis of the arts. By strengthening plasticity through the synthesis of the major arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, Le Corbusier sought to bring a sense of harmony to everyday life and reconstruct the country after World War Ⅱ. The plasticity of architecture was considered as a solution to social chaos, and the identification between aesthetic order and social reform leads to consider ‘aesthetic autonomy’ as a leitmotiv of modern architecture. The close relationship between art and life, or artistic form and social utility, was convinced, and the establishment of aesthetic order was regarded as a social practice. Leading this ‘aesthetic revolution,’ Le Corbusier sought to project the principle of nature’s form creation into art and correct the evils of the early mechanical civilization. He studied the laws of nature geometrically and tried to realize the aesthetic ideal of ‘ineffable space’ in his architecture. For him, the plasticity of architecture serves social health, and in this context, architecture was able to simultaneously achieve its aesthetic legitimacy and social function.