Collaboration: KNUT (KR)

Participants: 8 + 15 audience
 Chungju, South Korea

Duration: 3 hours (evening)

Mapping Memories was a guest round-table discussion hosted by Freiraum Kollektive at the Korean Institute of Technology on September 19, 2015. It aimed to bring together a multidisciplinary group of professionals from diverse backgrounds to examine the role of cultural memory in the shaping of future Korean cities. The evening explored approaches to how we can build on, and with, the past, drawing from case studies researched on the Silk Road. Attendees were invited to place their case study on the map and explore what relevance this might have in the Korean context.

​The concept of memories as fragments of what exists between the acts of forgetting and remembering was a leading thread in the Silk Road project. Like Elsa Peralta 

we see memories as “not just the past as we remember it; [but] also the past as we have forgotten it”.

For Freiraum Kollektive, the question of how architecture can engage with built remains, both material and cultural, is critical for both theoretical discourse and the art of building today. Through a detailed analysis of the contemporary case studies, we aim to question what is worth remembering and how architecture can act as a frame for this. Which layers are kept; which are removed? How are they transformed? Here time plays a formative role, as power structures dawn and crumble in an ever-shifting urban landscape. Who decides today what we will remember tomorrow?



A hidden passage winds down beneath the skin of the finely manicured urban (junk)-scape into a subterranean acropolis laying dormant below. Our first case-study invites observers to explore with us the sharp remnants in the belly of a post-Soviet underworld. 


Conversely, for our second you must stand in line and purchase your ticket. Here we present a strongly secured world heritage site visited by thousands of eager tourists each day. Among a forest of ‘selfie-sticks’ and posing platforms, exactly who is considering architecture?