If You Love Seoul, You Can Wear It! (2025)
Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2025
Seoul Biennale Special Award (2 teams selected out of 66)
Team: Sein Jin, Eunseok Hur, Yeonkyung Ahn, and 31 local community members
Role: Team Leader
Humanise Wall: in collaboration with Heatherwick Studio & eight creator teams
Presentaion: https://www.youtube.com/live/mx0i4shK8gs?si=JMXHYzxOSOKeIm06
Team: Sein Jin, Eunseok Hur, Yeonkyung Ahn, and 31 local community members
Role: Team Leader
Humanise Wall: in collaboration with Heatherwick Studio & eight creator teams
Presentaion: https://www.youtube.com/live/mx0i4shK8gs?si=JMXHYzxOSOKeIm06
Humanise Wall
Cities are humanity’s most complex creation, yet we often forget to view them through a human lens. The Humanise Wall, the centerpiece of the 2025 Seoul Biennale, is a 90-meter-long and 16-meter-high installation at Songhyeon Green Plaza. Designed to spark conversation about how architecture shapes our emotions, it begins with two simple questions: How do the buildings in your city make you feel? And how can they become more joyful and engaging?
For this project, we collaborated with the Seongsu community to translate local memories and emotions into thousands of brick-sized units filled with colors and images. Each brick functions as a textile-like patch, carrying emotional data on one side and fragments of neighborhood scenery on the other. Together, they form a façade that clothes the city, an urban garment woven from collective feelings. It transforms a faceless metropolis into a human and emotional landscape, revealing how everyday architectural elements can become more delightful and immersive.
Image © Yongjoon Choi
Image © Yongjoon Choi
Image © 서울특별시
Image © 서울특별시
Image © 서울특별시
If you love Seoul, you can wear it!
Seongsu-dong in Seoul is a neighborhood where factories, handmade shoe alleys, Seoul Forest’s natural landscape, and ever-changing trends intertwine like a patchwork quilt. Once industrial, it has become a “21st-century instant city” filled with pop-ups and social media-driven events. This project reimagines Seongsu’s layered character by collaborating with the local community to create a façade that the city could “wear” like clothing—an architectural garment woven from collective memories and emotions.
Through community workshops and a custom emotional survey, community members recorded cherished textures, façades, and everyday scenes of Seongsu. Their feelings were mapped onto James Russell’s circumplex model of affect—where emotions are organized along axes of positivity and arousal—and visualized as colors. These were paired with photographs of Seongsu’s scenery, upscaled using AI and divided into 6,685 brick-sized “memory units.” Each brick displayed a color on one side (based on emotion) and an image fragment on the other, creating an emotional textile for the building.
Using AI algorithms such as EfficientNetV2, t-SNE, and RasterFairy, the memory-bricks were arranged by visual similarity into a harmonious mosaic. From afar, the façade shimmers like patterned fabric; up close, it reveals intimate glimpses of Seongsu’s everyday life. Distinctly Seoul-like elements—iron doors, awnings, ducts, pop-up structures, and playful signage—were incorporated as accessories in this urban garment.
In a city where architecture often becomes an Instagram backdrop, this project proposes a more human alternative: buildings that embody emotion, memory, and connection. By weaving together collective experiences, Seongsu transforms from a faceless metropolis into a living, emotional landscape—inviting community members to quite literally “wear Seoul” with pride and affection.
[Site: Seongsu-dong]
[Co-design Process]
Local community members selected and documented facades and surface textures that evoked emotional responses.
Collect emotions evoked by façades and textures and map them onto Russell’s circumplex model of affect.
Divide collected images into brick-sized units (typical brick ratio 19:6, 95px × 30px)
Extract and embed visual features through AI-based image analysis.
Reduce the dimensions of image features into a two-dimensional space for arrangement.
Rearrange image-bricks into a harmonious visual composition based on similarity.
7. Decorate with building accessories from Seongsu-dong
Incorporate familiar Seongsu details—iron doors, awnings, ducts, and signage—as accessories
8. Emotion as Color
Visualize emotional data by 31 community members from 57 buildings as a color palette, completing the emotional façade.
Community Workshop_01
You Can Really Wear It!
“You Can Really Wear It!” is a participatory exhibition inspired by the everyday architecture of Seongsu-dong, where citizens were invited to literally wear and experience architectural elements.
Through a collaborative workshop, architectural façades were translated into patterned textiles, while building components—such as signage and air conditioner units—were reimagined as badges. The resulting works were exhibited at the Seoul Hall of Architecture and Urbanism, expanding the notion of wearable architecture beyond costumes into a broader range of urban-inspired fashion objects.
During the exhibition, citizens wore the costumes and freely explored Songhyeon Square, which temporarily transformed into a public runway. Participants proudly walked while “wearing Seoul,” capturing photographs and sharing their stories of being part of a Beautiful Seoul.
By imagining themselves wearing the architecture of the city, citizens may deepen their affection for Seoul’s urban landscape—contributing, little by little, to a more beautiful city.
Even for those who do not yet love Seoul, that is perfectly fine. At this Biennale, everyone was given the chance to touch, choose, and wear architecture—forming new emotional connections with the city.
Wearable Facade & Signage Badges
Community Workshop_02