AAVS Seoul

AAVS Seoul 2026: Emerged in Seoul 3–12 July 2026 | Yonsei University, Seoul Applications are now open — apply via the link in bio. AAVS Seoul 2026 explores what has emerged from Seoul’s social, spatial, and territorial realities through research, documentation, and design. This year‘s programme is organised into three units: Unit 1: Hidden Urban Structures and Operations Unit 2: The Korean Apartment Unit 3: Reclaimed Materials Through the comparative study of informal urban fabrics, architectural typologies, and material ecosystems, the workshop expands our understanding of what has emerged — and continues to emerge — in Seoul. Early registration until 31 May. Bursary options are available upon request — please contact us for further information. @aavisiting_school @aaschool @yonsei_arch AAVS Seoul 2026의 참가 신청이 이제 가능합니다. 프로필 링크(link in bio)를 확인해주세요! AAVS Seoul 2026은 서울의 사회적·공간적·영토적 현실 속에서 발현되어 온 것들을 탐구하고 기록하며 디자인합니다. 유닛 1: 숨겨진 도시 구조와 작동 방식 유닛 2: 한국의 아파트 유닛 3: 재활용된 재료 도시 구조, 건축 유형, 그리고 재료 생태계를 비교 연구하며 서울에서 이미 발현된 것들, 그리고 지금도 계속 나타나고 있는 것들에 대한 이해를 확장합니다. 조기 등록: 5월 31일까지. 이후에는 장학 지원(bursary) 옵션이 제공될 예정이니 자세한 사항은 문의해 주세요.

AAVS Seoul 2026: Emerged in Seoul 3–12 July 2026 | Yonsei University, Seoul Applications are now open — apply via the link in bio. AAVS Seoul 2026 explores what has emerged from Seoul’s social, spatial, and territorial realities through research, documentation, and design. This year‘s programme is organised into three units: Unit 1: Hidden Urban Structures and Operations Unit 2: The Korean Apartment Unit 3: Reclaimed Materials Through the comparative study of informal urban fabrics, architectural typologies, and material ecosystems, the workshop expands our understanding of what has emerged — and continues to emerge — in Seoul. Early registration until 31 May. Bursary options are available upon request — please contact us for further information. AAVS Seoul 2026의 참가 신청이 이제 가능합니다. 프로필 링크(link in bio)를 확인해주세요! AAVS Seoul 2026은 서울의 사회적·공간적·영토적 현실 속에서 발현되어 온 것들을 탐구하고 기록하며 디자인합니다. 유닛 1: 숨겨진 도시 구조와 작동 방식 유닛 2: 한국의 아파트 유닛 3: 재활용된 재료 도시 구조, 건축 유형, 그리고 재료 생태계를 비교 연구하며 서울에서 이미 발현된 것들, 그리고 지금도 계속 나타나고 있는 것들에 대한 이해를 확장합니다. 조기 등록: 5월 31일까지. 이후에는 장학 지원(bursary) 옵션이 제공될 예정이니 자세한 사항은 문의해 주세요.

AAVS Seoul 2026: Emerged in Seoul 3–12 July 2026 | Yonsei University, Seoul Applications are now open — apply via the link in bio. AAVS Seoul 2026 explores what has emerged from Seoul’s social, spatial, and territorial realities through research, documentation, and design. This year‘s programme is organised into three units: Unit 1: Hidden Urban Structures and Operations Unit 2: The Korean Apartment Unit 3: Reclaimed Materials Through the comparative study of informal urban fabrics, architectural typologies, and material ecosystems, the workshop expands our understanding of what has emerged — and continues to emerge — in Seoul. Early registration until 31 May. Bursary options are available upon request — please contact us for further information. AAVS Seoul 2026의 참가 신청이 이제 가능합니다. 프로필 링크(link in bio)를 확인해주세요! AAVS Seoul 2026은 서울의 사회적·공간적·영토적 현실 속에서 발현되어 온 것들을 탐구하고 기록하며 디자인합니다. 유닛 1: 숨겨진 도시 구조와 작동 방식 유닛 2: 한국의 아파트 유닛 3: 재활용된 재료 도시 구조, 건축 유형, 그리고 재료 생태계를 비교 연구하며 서울에서 이미 발현된 것들, 그리고 지금도 계속 나타나고 있는 것들에 대한 이해를 확장합니다. 조기 등록: 5월 31일까지. 이후에는 장학 지원(bursary) 옵션이 제공될 예정이니 자세한 사항은 문의해 주세요.

Good work deserves a good meal. Between site visits, research sessions, and long days in the studio, AAVS Seoul found its rhythm around Korean BBQ, soju, and the easy warmth of a table shared with people you've been making things with all week. Of course, Jun Aoki also joined us for the evening!

Last year, AAVS Seoul 2025 took Cheonggyecheon as one of its research sites — a restored urban stream cutting through the dense commercial fabric of central Seoul, where an elevated motorway once stood. Participants walked the length of the channel, reading the city from below street level: the retaining walls, the bridges overhead, the strange quietness of water running through one of the busiest districts in the world. #aavisitingschool

AAVS Seoul 2026 [Unit 3] Reclaim Seoul: Combinatorial Material Reuse for a Temporal City Tutors: Andrea Rossi + Hyo Wook Kim This year, Unit 3 will treat the city itself as a material resource. Working under the theme "Made in Seoul", students will collect reclaimed and readily available urban materials and digitise them using smartphone scanning and computer vision tools, extracting geometry and connection logic for immediate use in design workflows. These elements will be organised into combinatorial aggregation systems using Wasp, generating spatial configurations that can shift in density, programme, and openness over time. Augmented reality will guide assembly on site, replacing conventional drawings with real-time construction interfaces. The unit will culminate in physical prototypes that demonstrate how reclaimed matter, computational logic, and AR construction can produce adaptive, reversible architecture embedded in Seoul's urban fabric.

AAVS Seoul 2026 [Unit 2] Communal Block: The Housing Question of Korean APT Tutors: Jang Hee Lee + Seonwoo Kim This year, Unit 2 will take the Korean apartment not as a problem to be solved, but as a political object to be read. Behind the persistent housing crisis lies not a shortage of units, but a system in which housing serves as a tool of capital accumulation and social control — as Engels diagnosed in The Housing Question 150 years ago. Students will trace the APT's contested history and use its existing structure as a foundation for radical intervention, reclaiming overlooked spaces such as corridors, balconies, and pilotis as sites of collective life. The unit will ultimately ask what a new APT could look like as an infrastructure of mutual care.

AAVS Seoul 2026 [Unit 1] Après-PERSPECTIVE III Tutors: Tamao Hashimoto + Sano Satoshi + Jae Won Yi This year, Unit 1 positions Eulji-ro as a site of layered tensions, where sensory encounters reveal hidden urban logics beyond visible form. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han's notion of Eros as a lost intensity of everyday relational experience, the unit questions what has disappeared within contemporary urban life. Rather than surveying the city as a fixed object, students will engage it through immersion, tracing fleeting interactions, overlooked materials, and residual spaces. These fragments will be reassembled through drawing, film, and notation, exposing subtle relationships between bodies and environments. Through this process, the city is approached not as a stable system, but as a field of shifting sensory negotiations open to reinterpretation and intervention.

AAVS Seoul 2025 [Undertone] Path of the familiar and the unfamiliar Jiun Lim, Seungheon Lee, Minji Kim UNIT 1 | Après-PERSPECTIVE II Tutors: Tamao Hashimoto + Satoshi Sano In 2025, Unit 1 investigated how sensory experiences, rather than habitual actions, shaped urban conditions in Seoul. Through immersion within chosen territories, students documented hidden social activities and interactions using drawing, photography, and film, revealing the complexity of everyday urban life. These observations were then translated into analyses of physical components—materials, spatial configurations, and built environments—that influence inhabitation. By confronting the relationship between the social and the physical, students developed speculative interventions that challenged and reconfigured existing conditions. The collective proposals were assembled into a unified urban strategy, transforming the site into a responsive framework for rethinking spatial and social dynamics in the city.

AAVS Seoul 2025 [The Part and the Whole] From 0.32m² to 50,000m² in the apartment Young Taek Kim UNIT 4 | Decompressed City Seoul Tutors: Doyeon Cho + Junebum Park In 2025, Unit 4 examined how traditional and contemporary Korean rituals shaped spatial conditions under shifting social, political, and economic forces. Through site visits and documentation, specific precedents were analysed to uncover how architecture became condensed, transformed, or reinvented. Students reimagined these rituals within decompressed spatial frameworks—moving beyond historical typologies to speculate on alternative futures. Using collage as a generative method, the project layered narratives, contexts, and transformations to articulate new spatial possibilities for ritual practices in Seoul. #aavisitingschool

AAVS Seoul 2026: Engaged in Seoul The AA Visiting School Seoul returns in 2026, bringing together an intensive programme of design and research. Through prototyping, tutorials, lectures, discussions, experiments, drawings, and critiques, participants engage with diverse approaches to contemporary architectural practice. The programme fosters a collaborative learning environment, encouraging critical thinking, making, and exchange across disciplines. 📅 Dates: 3–12 July 2026 📍 Location: Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea 📝 Applications are now open Apply now: See link in bio Enquiries: [email protected] #aavisitingschool

We are pleased to introduce Hyo Wook Kim @kv_xv_lifestyle as a tutor at AAVS Seoul 2026. Hyo Wook Kim is a Research Associate at the Department of Experimental and Digital Design and Construction (EDEK) at the University of Kassel, Germany. His work bridges research and teaching and includes the design and realization of 1:1 prototypes and full-scale timber pavilion structures. His research focuses on stress-informed design and automated robotic fabrication workflows for circular timber construction using reclaimed wood, integrating AR-supported, adhesive-free assembly methods. He studied architecture in Seoul and completed his Master’s degree in Integrative Technologies and Architectural Design Research (ITECH) at the University of Stuttgart. @edek.unikassel Image 2: Real-time structural analysis feedback loop using Augmented Reality with Reused materials at the Munich Zukunfthandwerk Congress 2025 invited by Cybercraft Institute, built by EDEK University of Kassel, Germany, 2025 Image 3: Additive robotic assembly techniques for timber construction by EDEK University of Kassel Germany, 2023 Image 4: Reassembled reclaimed timber roof for a research center using rule-based design aggregation by Ayleen Huemmerich and Angelique Keil, developed in the Bauforschung:LAB Studio by EDEK University of Kassel Germany, 2024 Image 5: Robotic non-sequential assembled full-scale triangulated frame structure by EDEK University of Kassel & École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Germany, 2024