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Volunteering Consultant
Kangil Ji is a design partner at Terminal7 Architects, which is based in both New York City and Seoul, South Korea. He is currently working on a cultural venue project in the center of Seoul; a commission he was awarded after winning an international design competition sponsored by the city government.
Kangil sees design as an opportunity to influence the spatial narratives of a place to more appropriately reflect the needs and values of its residents and users. His sensibility and strategies derive from a careful evaluation of the relationship between people's desires and behavior, and urban imagery and morphology. He supplements his investigation of the local with a comparative analysis of global cities and uses wide-ranging sources to define and uncover hidden relationships; his research is typically materialized as a series of rigorous diagrammatic studies and the development of a common visual and spatial language among the collaborators of his design team.
He received his Masters in Architecture II from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and his Bachelors of Architecture from the Korea National University of Arts (RIBA Part I & II). During his studies, he was a winner of several awards/scholarships/grants, including: Best Prize in the Seoul Urban Design International Competition (2013), Finalist of the Norman Foster Travel Scholarship supported by RIBA (2011), recipient of the Minister's full scholarship (2010), and of travel grants supported by TU Delft (2010), Konrad Adenauer Foundation (2004), NC Soft (2003), and the Daum Foundation (2003). He has also actively participated in several design research and publication projects, most notably for the Elements of Architecture exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2014), curated by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam.
Prior to joining Terminal7 Architects, he collaborated on design projects in the U.S. and Korea, with a range of scales including a highrise residential tower, commercial hotel, master plans for mix-used developments and master plans for an urban park.
KANGIL JI
Oct. 2015
"Seoul Chronicle" by Terminal 7 Architects was awarded first place in the Sejongdaero Competition because the project '...translated the layer of history around the site in micro and macro-view, interpreting the nature's level and layer surrounding Seoul... The simple understated rectangular platform is raised to the Deoksugung Palace Stonewall level, creating an attractive viewpoint, overlooking the cathedral, Seoul Plaza, and Sogongro."
"We want to take a fresh look at the fundamental elements of architecture - used by any architect, anywhere, anytime - to see if we can discover something new about architecture." - Rem Koolhaas, Announcement of the 14th Vennice Architecture Biennale on the 25th of January, 2013
"Hyper Landscape" proposes a new urban identity for the city of Seoul with the following tectonic interventions: 1) Rediscover and reconnect hidden waterways to the site, 2) Create park and amenities along the waterway, 3) Induce successive restructuring of the urban fabric, and 4) Consolidate a strong interdependency among urban elements.
"Evolutionary Context: New Architectural Typology from Korean Context" proposes an architectural amplification of contemporary social theories of complexity and multiplicity.
Seoul Cultural Space
Elements Exhibition
Seoul Urban Design
RIBA President's Medal
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