18 February 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
MAGDALENA GRÜNER
Universität Hamburg
Respondent: Krista Mileva-Frank, MIT
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Deep-sea diorama in the New York Zoological Society pavilion, New York World’s Fair 1939/40, size and materials unknown, Princeton University Library Special Collections, William Beebe Papers, box 12, folder 9.
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Creating a Social Environment for Coexistence: American Architectural Discourse and
MAN JOONG KIM
Binghamton University
Respondent: Sang Pil Lee, Kennesaw State University
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Left diagram: Kim Tai Soo, Van Block Housing, Progressive Architecture (January 1969) Right floor plan: Woo Kyu Sung, Roosevelt Island, AIA Journal (July 1975)
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
“Forever Hidden”: Architectures of epistemological resistance at the New York World’s Fair 1939/40
MAGDALENA GRÜNER
Universität Hamburg
Respondent: Krista Mileva-Frank, MIT
Deep-sea diorama in the New York Zoological Society pavilion, New York World’s Fair 1939/40, size and materials unknown, Princeton University Library Special Collections, William Beebe Papers, box 12, folder 9.
The pavilion of the New York Zoological Society at the 1939/40 World’s Fair was a veritable twentieth century cabinet of curiosities: electric eel “Electra” sending out Westen Union telegrams, the Bronx Zoo’s famed giant panda “Pandora,” a number of titillating birds and fish labelled as the “crown jewels” as well as habitat groups of different sizes. The highlight of the exhibit, however, was the area dedicated to William Beebe’s deep sea dives on the Bermuda Oceanographic Expeditions, which were the site of the first crewed descents to the ocean-depths, conducted with a diving device called the “bathysphere” in the early 1930ies. This spherical part of the building housed not only the bathysphere itself, but also a series of deep sea dioramas, modeled after pictures painted by expedition artist Else Bostelmann. Within the sphere, a show of light and darkness, of seeing and not-seeing, of science and fiction awaited the audience. While this exhibit can be understood as a model of the bathysphere, the deep sea, and of being present in the deep sea all at once, it also articulates scientific epistemology that embraces non-knowledge, imagination, and fantasy as crucial vehicles of knowledge-making. The aim of my paper is to argue that the bathysphere exhibit is one of the displays on the 1939/40 World’s Fair grounds that undermined the general message of the fair which emphasized a science based on technocratic principles as the key to a prosperous future. Instead, it proposed a science that met its subject of investigation with curiosity rather than rationalist domestication, with awareness of its own limitations rather than claims of absolute authority, with playful engagement rather than entitled mastery.
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Creating a Social Environment for Coexistence: American Architectural Discourse and
Korean Architects/Urban Planners during the Cold War
MAN JOONG KIM
Binghamton University
Respondent: Sang Pil Lee, Kennesaw State University
Left diagram: Kim Tai Soo, Van Block Housing, Progressive Architecture (January 1969) Right floor plan: Woo Kyu Sung, Roosevelt Island, AIA Journal (July 1975)
Throughout the 1960s, new perceptions of the environment were ignited by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Martin Luther King Jr.’s advocacy for the Fair Housing Act. The built environment should have shifted its focus toward ecological and spatial justice. Simultaneously, architecture students from Korea, who longed to embrace modernist architecture, encountered challenges from postmodernist claims on their campuses. Faculty and students in U.S. schools were relatively progressive and sought to engage with the discourses demanded by society, while Korean students adjusted themselves to the novel North Atlantic framework through theory and practice. However, the narrative was not exclusively characterized by progressive tendencies. During the Cold War, the United States—as a state, institutions, and schools—actively sought to intervene in domestic urban crises as well as challenges within the Third World with architecture.
This study will examine how architecture students from Korea—specifically Kim Tai Soo, Woo Kyu Sung, and Kang Hong Bin—received education in the United States and how the reinterpreted and recontextualized their experiences from the U.S. in Korea as architects and urban planners. Furthermore, it will explore how architecture and urban planning that embodied publicness became a significant discourse and how this had supported their careers. The participated from the early stages of new interdisciplinary fields such as urban design and architectural theory, fulfilling a role of avant-garde.
This study will examine how architecture students from Korea—specifically Kim Tai Soo, Woo Kyu Sung, and Kang Hong Bin—received education in the United States and how the reinterpreted and recontextualized their experiences from the U.S. in Korea as architects and urban planners. Furthermore, it will explore how architecture and urban planning that embodied publicness became a significant discourse and how this had supported their careers. The participated from the early stages of new interdisciplinary fields such as urban design and architectural theory, fulfilling a role of avant-garde.