CAC Reading Room

CAC Seoul – Curating Architecture Collective Seoul – is currently running the Galpi Project 갈피 프로젝트 , starting in September 2023, which extracts architectural forms contained in books and buildings and builds its own reference tower. Based on the etymology of the word ‘Galpi 갈피’, which means “a gap between or between each overlapping or stacked object,” they explore the gaps and distinctions created by knowledge and sense, as well as the sense of ‘Eoreum 어름’ * with various collaborators.

Porosity : Penetrating Theses for Architecture

다공성: 건축을 위하여 침투하는 논제들

At the beginning of 2024, CAC Seoul dedicated efforts to broaden the discourse on architecture by exploring themes that challenge the rigidity of Korean architecture, such as feminism, women architects, ecology, and emotions. This collection brings together text lists, which are authored by women among the references introduced in the Galpi project #6-#9.

#6

Waste and Urban Regeneration: Interrelationships between Environmental and Social Ecologies by Jeong Hye Kim

Through the historical transformations of Nanjido from wetland to landfill to a park, we explore the ways in which material (topographical) and social waste are generated and interact.

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge, 1966
Jeong Hye Kim, Waste and Urban Regeneration, Routledge, 2021

#7

Planning and Emotion: Revisited by Hyejeong Park

In Enlightenment thinking, social scientists have tended to consider emotion as the contradiction of reason, and thus have marginalized emotional experiences in human activities in academic circles. However, through reflections on modernity, many researchers have given attention to the role of emotion in human activity. By introducing the emotional turn in social science, this presentation discusses why emotion matters in planning and how planners recognize the role of emotion in planning.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Penguin Books, 2001
Cho-Yeop Kim & Wonyoung Kim, Becoming a Cyborg, Sakyejul, 2021
Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Beacon Press, 1997

#8.

Organs Without Bodies, Art Museum as Media by Sungmin LJ

Art museums are changing into media that embrace diversity, including resistant and invisible forms of art and first-person voices of everyday reflection. Focusing on the process of building the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art, this talk discusses the museum’s architectural process and curatorial research on contemporary art in response to this shift from bodiless institutions to museums as media.

Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practices in Art, Writing, and Criticism, MIT Press, 2022
Sara Hendren, What can a body do? Riverhead Books, 2020

#9

Korean architecture and the marginalized home by Younjung Do

Discusses the biased representation of residential history in Korean architectural narratives. What is the defined women’s space in the house and whether the consideration was balanced?

Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother, Basic books, 1983
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities, MIT Press, 1981
Michelle Perrot, ed, A History of Private Life, Vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War Vol 4,  Harvard University Press, 1994

* Words used to describe boundaries
The place where the ends of two things are touching, the middle of an area between things, the threshold between an area and an area, the botulism between a time and a place.