from bd

“By Ellis Woodman
London Metropolitan University’s Architecture Research Unit has proposed one of three schemes chosen for the next stage in the development of South Korea’s enormous new reclaimed city of Saemangeum.
Alvaro Siza once speculated on the possibility of building in the Sahara desert, a site just about as close to tabula rasa as can be imagined.

He acknowledged the lure of the idea but conceded — or should that perhaps be hoped? — that “probably, when the foundations were dug, something would appear, delaying the proof of the Great Freedom: pottery shards, a gold coin, the turban of a nomad, indecipherable drawings etched on stone.”

These mixed emotions are doubtless familiar to the seven architectural teams that entered the invited competition to masterplan the new South Korean city of Saemangeum earlier this year. In terms of scale alone, the undertaking was fantastically daunting: when it is completed, Saemangeum will occupy an area of 396sq km — about two-thirds the size of Singapore. However, if that were not challenge enough, the feat of imagination required of the competitors was made infinitely greater by the nature of the site. At present, the vast bulk of the land on which Saemangeum will be built lies underwater.

The project has been in development since the late eighties, when the South Korean government proposed the estuarine landscape at the convergence of the Dongjin and Mangyeong rivers as the site for one of the largest land reclamation projects ever undertaken. The intention was for the land to support a mix of agriculture and industry, and for a newly constructed port to enable the city to forge trade links, particularly with China’s north-east coast just across the Yellow Sea. In 1991, work began on containing the site by means of a sea wall spanning 33km between the headlands that lie to the north and south.
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From the start, the project attracted a huge amount of controversy, particularly in relation to its anticipated environmental impact. Campaigners were concerned about the loss of mudflats on the site, which have always been an important feeding ground for the 400,000 shore birds which migrate annually from south-east Asia to Russia and Alaska. Arguing that the project’s construction would contribute to the decline of several endangered species, they succeeded in halting construction using supreme court challenges in both 1999 and 2005. Ultimately, that campaign proved unsuccessful, and work on the wall was completed in April 2006.

As a consequence, the land behind the wall has been transformed into a vast freshwater lake. Work is now under way to lower its level by 1.5m, a process that requires fresh water to be discharged daily into the sea via a series of sluice gates when the tide is low. Eventually, this will make 67sq km of currently submerged land available for use. The larger part of the new city — a further 270sq km — will be built on ground created by adding landfill to the lake bed…..” Read the rest here
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