winning proposal

Choi Eunhwa (Choi): The International Design Competition for Korean Museum of Urbanism and Architecture (KMUA) intended to create a ‘dynamic museum’ that would sustain future evolution and growth by accumulating and producing a wide range of content through linking the archive, exhibition, education and research activities. What was your interpretation of the guidelines for the competition?

Alejandro Zaera-Polo (Zaera-Polo): The most important idea behind our project was to make ‘the first architecture museum in history, designed specifically to contain actual works of architecture’, which would become part of its physical character. ‘A Recycling Assemblage’ is conceived as a work of scaffolding that will contain and incorporate parts of other buildings as a large-scale collage, and features a façade that future curators will be able to curate, just as they curate other exhibitions in the building. In treating the design as an assemblage of elements, we also aim to demonstrate to the general public how architecture is made. By adopting this assembled concept we aim to create an almost unlimited versatility in the curatorial activities. Everything can change: it is a scaffold, a shelf on which to locate architectural elements.

Choi: A Recycling Assemblage suggested recycling the structure of the 1960s and 1970s overpass and using it as the main structure for the museum building.

: As I mentioned, the museum was