Everything you need to build a nuclear submarine can be found in Sewoon Sangga, or so they used to say. Walking the labyrinthine levels of this concrete megastructure, which sweeps through the centre of Seoul like a convoy of container ships almost a mile long, it’s not hard to believe.

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Designed in the 1960s by Kim Swoo-geun, the country’s leading modernist architect, the complex was conceived as a self-contained universe, providing housing, offices, shops and restaurants, along with a school, hotel, daycare centre and cinema. There is even a library for the building’s residents, as well as churches of different denominations and elevated playgrounds, all hovering above a base of manufacturing that fizzes like an alchemist’s laboratory.

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“A vessel floating in the vast ocean called Seoul,” is how Kim described it, and it soon became home to its fair share of pirates peddling porn and knock-off records. Illicit activities thrived, the stigma grew, and Sewoon Sangga – which means “Erecting Good Energy” – was frequently voted the ugliest building in the city, its raw concrete frame subjected to a number of ill-advised cladding refits over the years. Successive mayors tried to have it demolished and replaced with gleaming glass towers, a fate only prevented by the presence of the nearby Jongmyo shrine, a Unesco world heritage site.

Sewoon Sangga’s flat concrete roofs stretch in a line across the centre of Seoul.
Sewoon Sangga’s flat concrete roofs stretch in a line across the centre of Seoul. © Oliver Wainwright

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“The businesses here mostly make copies of famous brands,” says Kang. “We want to get young designers to inspire the fabricators to do something different, injecting new energy into the area.” A range of experimental garments dangle above the desks inside, their intricacy demonstrating the range of skills on this one street alone.

One of the biennale’s two flagship exhibitions is staged nearby, inside the bulbous silver spaceship of Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza, a $450m leviathan that landed here in 2014. The curators have pulled no punches in letting the impact of this big white elephant – a vanity project of the previous mayor – speak for itself. 

“When I see this thing, I think the city has created a monster,” says street vendor Woojong Suk, in a video shown in the exhibition. Her business was displaced by the arrival of the big blob, which swept away a lively market that used to operate from a former stadium. “No one knows what it is for. The city spent all this money, but they never explained how they would use the building.”

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The other main exhibition is found across town at Donuimun Village, a dense muddle of historic buildings and winding alleyways that was slated for demolition, but has been saved and refurbished as a biennale initiative. The charming maze has been taken over by a series of conceptual installations curated by Spanish architect Alejandro Zaera-Polo, looking at everything from how sensors perceive the city to how mushroom mycelium can be used to grow structural components. A lot of it falls into the category of bad installation art with a whiff of academia.

The true power of what the Seoul biennale might be is found less in the content of these exhibitions than in the wider role it can perform for the city. “We conceived it as a way of discussing urban issues with the citizens of Seoul,” says Kim Young-Joon, the city’s chief architect. “It can’t just be a discussion among experts, like most biennales. It should be a vehicle for discussing the future of Seoul and testing ideas. We have been spending a lot of time protesting about politics, but not about architecture and the environment. The general public awareness is not there yet.”

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