Event

City: Hall

ByDesign 2015

Apr 12

(Jeong Jae-eun, South Korea, 2013)

Seattle premiere!
Co-presented with Civilization

Sunday, Apr 12 at 05:00PM

In City: Hall, Jeong (responsible for the coming-of-age masterpiece Take Care of My Cat, 2001 and the fascinating urban youth film The Aggressives, 2005), takes on the eponymous edifice, under construction since May 2008 and finally finished in September 2012.

Seoul's City Hall turned out to be one of the most controversial buildings ever erected in a city that has withstood countless acts of destruction and reconstructionfirst by an arrogant colonial power, and later by a devastating global war and several military dictatorships hell-bent on splashing the markers of compressed modernity on its face.

The new city hall, designed by renowned architect Yoo Kerl, became controversial not in the least because its appearance was shockingly futuristic, especially in contrast with the old city hall built in the colonial period (now to be preserved as the metropolitan library). Your own impression upon seeing the former under construction for the first time may be something along the lines of a "glass-eyed Cyclops reclining on a space-alien's gargantuan metal cot, lazily letting Ulysses' crew crawl all over its massive body."