borders agriculture war economy checkpoints
an architecture for the dmz infrastructure | reunification by mike taylor
With a landscape organised in strips of adjacent infrastructure, the need for architecture comes at the
T his is a project set in Cheorwon, the only county on the Korean peninsula severed by the demilitarised zone, diminishing the potential of its Geumwha Valley to be efficiently farmed. However, its adjacency to the naturalised lands of the DMZ has created an ad hoc nature reserve for migratory birds, a popular tourist destination and a premium market for the organic rice grown here using traditional methods. In April 2012, a third nuclear device was detonated by an increasingly belligerent North Korea, while South Korea continues its three-decade trend as the fastest growing economy in the world. Regardless of this polarisation, reunification continues to be pursued. To further this agenda, the peninsula’s extreme economic disparity must be ameliorated using models that push hard currency north and engage the North’s labour force. With Cheorwon county at the nexus of a fertile agricultural valley, unspoiled lowland habitat, a cluster of tourist sites and the heavily fortified demilitarised zone, this area has the potential to host a model of cross-border economic cooperation that can be catalytic for economic and social progress within the Korean peninsula. My project proposes a special economic zone for rice production at the interesection of the agricultural valley and the DMZ. The unfarmed areas of the DMZ have the potential to enable access for North Korean farmers to the South Korean market. By leveraging the traditional farming methods of North Koreans – manual land preparation, no pesticides and hand- threshing, against a burgeoning market for organic rice in South Korea, this scheme subverts use of the void border space to increase the buying power of North Korean farmers.
facing page: The formal concept of the project is derived from the need to bridge. Farm and military roads align with lowland habitat and, when situ- ated next to an agricultural settlement, the site location allegorises the greater condition within the DMZ at Cheorwon. The surface geometry creates a double curvature for way finding along the bridged landscape. Incisions allow for access onto the landscape: a point of contact between South Korean tourists and North Korean farmers. Additionally they create a stacking of program underneath the surface, organising the rice mill located below. intersections where farm roads cross the riparian zone, or tourist paths, or military surveillance roads. These intersections are microcosms of the greater condition of the DMZ, which cuts through Cheorwon’s fertile agricultural valley and is a condition in which architecture can be deployed as an allegorical response to the greater border issue. An architecture based on the need to bridge, layers circulation in section to create a vertical set of adjacencies: a stacked border condition, blurred by an undulating surface geometry. Architecture is given the agency to organise a miniaturised DMZ, revealing the spatial consequences of already existing and extremely surreal adjacencies. By redefining in section boundaries that are typically fixed in plan, confronting agriculture, the military, tourism and nature becomes necessarily architectural. This architecture reveals the uncanny juxtapositions that exist within the DMZ, and that confront the economic issues of reunification. These juxtapositions become generative factors for architectural form.
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