This essay examines OMA's winning proposal for the New Hongik Campus competition (2023) through the lens of Seoul's post-IMF urban strategy and the concept of absolute architecture. It argues that Koolhaas's sustained claim to political neutrality — his insistence that architecture is affirmative rather than critical — is not a position outside politics but a position within it: one that reproduces, rather than interrogates, the spatial logics of flexible accumulation and spectacle.
The essay proceeds in three movements. It first situates the New Hongik competition within the broader trajectory of Design Seoul, tracing how the post-1997 neoliberal turn institutionalised the starchitect system as a tool of symbolic capital accumulation. It then reads OMA's proposal through Koolhaas's concept of Bigness — the self-enclosed, programmatically promiscuous megastructure that operates as a city within a city — and asks what political work this form performs in the context of Seoul's campus urbanism. Finally, drawing on Pier Vittorio Aureli's concept of absolute architecture and Oswald Mathias Ungers's archipelago model, it proposes that the formal self-completeness Koolhaas deploys as a descriptor of Bigness can also be read — against Koolhaas — as the condition of a genuinely political architecture: one that declares a boundary, takes a position, and refuses the infinite continuity of capitalist urbanisation.
The question this essay ultimately puts to Korean architects is not whether to engage with the conditions Koolhaas diagnosed, but whether to do so with or without a verdict.
This essay examines OMA's winning proposal for the New Hongik Campus competition (2023) through the lens of Seoul's post-IMF urban strategy and the concept of absolute architecture. It argues that Koolhaas's sustained claim to political neutrality — his insistence that architecture is affirmative rather than critical — is not a position outside politics but a position within it: one that reproduces, rather than interrogates, the spatial logics of flexible accumulation and spectacle.
The essay proceeds in three movements. It first situates the New Hongik competition within the broader trajectory of Design Seoul, tracing how the post-1997 neoliberal turn institutionalised the starchitect system as a tool of symbolic capital accumulation. It then reads OMA's proposal through Koolhaas's concept of Bigness — the self-enclosed, programmatically promiscuous megastructure that operates as a city within a city — and asks what political work this form performs in the context of Seoul's campus urbanism. Finally, drawing on Pier Vittorio Aureli's concept of absolute architecture and Oswald Mathias Ungers's archipelago model, it proposes that the formal self-completeness Koolhaas deploys as a descriptor of Bigness can also be read — against Koolhaas — as the condition of a genuinely political architecture: one that declares a boundary, takes a position, and refuses the infinite continuity of capitalist urbanisation.
The question this essay ultimately puts to Korean architects is not whether to engage with the conditions Koolhaas diagnosed, but whether to do so with or without a verdict.