In an ever-increasing dense urban environment, with soon more than half of the world’s population living in cities, traditional farming will become less and less sustainable in feeding our cities. Agriculture and the city, two words which have been traditionally separated, will have to increasingly share a common ground, in the prospect of urban farming. Food will have to be produced and distributed locally, avoiding our traditionally wasteful transportation system.

The 2015 Korean Pavilion at the world EXPO held in Milan, will illustrate possibilities and ideas for urban farming and sharing, challenging both our notion of agriculture through its architecture, and of architecture through its multi-layered sustainable strategies.

Built in a mix of low and hi-tech material, the pavilion shall be entirely recyclable, so to minimize the waste left by our participation to the EXPO, and should stand itself as an educational construction, emphasizing through its architecture our necessary commitment to a less wasteful and shared environment.

The primary building material will be a locally manufactured scaffolding system, commonly used for building maintenance and construction, which will minimize pollution due to transportation and thanks to its flexibility can be easily assembled and taken apart once the EXPO has run its course, to serve other purposes.

The scaffolding system will serve the double purpose of structurally supporting the building, where necessary in the form of a three-dimensional space frame. Occupying the entirety of the site, it has been conceptually thought of as a continuous and dense urban farm, from which all required exhibition spaces have been carved out as negative voids.

On the roof, the dense three dimensional mesh of scaffolding turns into a forest of vertical pipes shaded by leaf shaped solar panels, generating energy for the building, while shading the crowds from the sun during the harshest hours of the day.

These, nominally a long entrance ramp, exhibition spaces, restaurants and plaza, have been designed too so that their frame and panels can be also reassembled, in conjunction with the scaffolding, as greenhouses.

In this manner, our pavilion, will be feeding the planet once during the EXPO in Milan, and once again when it will be reinstalled in the form of greenhouses, using the scaffolding system, the cladding panels and the planting devices that we have designed.

Team:

Byoung Cho
Costantino di Sambuy
Shin Myoung
Adrien Moreau
Andrew Stulz
Hansol Moon
Hong Joon