Author: Openact Architecture Team: Carlos Zarco Sanz. Advisor: Nestor Montenegro Type: Research/Competition Location: New York, USA Status: Third award, Shortlisted. Period: March 2013 The enticing aspect of Korea town’s sense of place is its potential to form a community beyond its geographical limitations. The focus on Korean culture and multitude of social venues allows the space to be a site of social interaction connecting people together to form networks and cultivate the space. All the elements of the busy Korean street that apply to Manhattan’s 32nd street has the potential to act as more than just a commercialized recreation of Seoul, the Korea Town can also serve to support a community of Korean-Americans to connect with American society while maintaining ties with Korea. The project, at this point, aims to empower this connection between differences not only through commercialism and consumerism but encouraging cultural exploration of the Korean Culture, which the project avoids to define but leaves room for it to be brought and change. Since no one could know in advance the constantly shifting needs and desires of the users or how the future direction of Korean culture would be, the space needs to be continuously adaptable to a fluid program. Moreover, any attempt to define a specific program would foreclose on unforeseen developments and possibilities; therefore, the Korean Diaspora that inhabits incomings would acknowledge the inevitability of change, chance, and indeterminacy by incorporating uncertainties as integral to a continuously evolving process modeled after self-regulating organic processes. Considering the potential voids at the site, the two identical Boxes are placed on top the two existing buildings of Korea Way. To feed these public programmed spaces, the main public realm of the Korea Way, the street/sidewalks in particular, was required to be physically extended; however, this brought a challenge since the flow of the public realm is horizontal and the accesses to the Boxes are only through verticality. In order to solve this problem, two connector DEVICEs are developed as mediators. Although the strategy remains the same for the connection of the two Boxes to Korea Way, the tactics of the design vary as the project considers the local features of the plots. As socially interactive architecture, the project integrates concepts of technological interchangeability with social participation and improvisation as innovative and egalitarian alternatives to traditional free time and education, giving back to the public a sense of agency and creativity. The three-dimensional structure of the BOX is the operative space-time matrix of a virtual architecture. The variable ‘‘program’’ and form of the program are not conventional architecture but much closer to what we understand today as the computer program: an array of algorithmic functions and logical gateways that control temporal events and processes in a virtual device. The project does not really searches for a building at all but a vast, socially interactive machine, an improvisational architecture, constantly changing in a ceaseless cycle of assembly, dismantling and shifting. While bringing this flexibility, it creates a three dimensional space, but the components does not refer an aesthetic treatment rather the bare bones structural armature on which its interactive and fluid program could play out. It is primarily there to respond to the changing needs and desires of individuals, not to house prepackaged exhibits and events for a generalized public. Thus, the project can have a focus on communication rather than technology; or exchange rather than indoctrination. It can be a trading house rather than a trademark; an engine rather than an icon. - Third Award in the "International Architectural Thesis Award 2013" organized by Re-Thinking the Future in New York, USA. - Shortlisted in "Graduate Architecture Award 2013" organized by Graduate Architecture in Barcelona, Spain 2013.