Media / Metamorphosis

Jungmi Won

Speculating meanings of words focused on the aspect of city would be crucial for expanding our thoughts. In spite that reviewing and analyzing city has its limits because we have views of architectural bases, reading its logic is essential to set up our position toward present and future because our every occupation will perform inside of logic of city.

To read our present urban environment and to expect future city, ‘Media and Metamorphosis’ would be key words. City is more than sum of its multiple layers. In the era of information, in the era that speedy flow of media actively affects people’s life and consideration, measuring physical territories and expecting its application in the certain boundary would naïve strategy in terms of creating new settlement. Identifying invisible flow, scrutinizing character of media is definitely difficult process because it is a work challenging and testing our territory of knowledge and common spatial sense. Architects are familiar with creating an idea and applying it into a product. We tend to become uncomfortable if we don’t have a morphological solution. But, in the level of city, those words would be accepted with different values.

‘Media’ is not only the word representing delivering information. In the level of city, media itself can represent city. Also, city can be made by power of media. Media is result of human intellectual activity and city is operated by human intellectual performance in terms of social, economical, political reasons. Media can generate different level of spaces and experience inside city because it is deeply involved in the city life. For instance, enclosed space for experience a media provides different timeline and perception about reality to audience. The city consisted of this kind of media spaces would be totally different level of environment in term of city life. In our era that tremendous amount of information and contents exchange and spread through mass media, our reality is being affected by its power in relation to physical settings especially more in the city. Therefore, speculating the word, metamorphosis with the eye view related in ‘Media’ would be more appropriate in term of provoking profound thoughts rather than matching the word to architectural process.