An emotional city, a global conversation: reflections from Seoul

Seoul opened its 5th Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism by sparking a public conversation – not an insider debate – about the need for radically more human buildings.

Emotional City was a two-day forum which brought together more than 300 participants – city leaders, creatives, academics, developers, designers and citizens – for leading-edge research, expert lectures and creative community projects to ask: how do the outsides of buildings affect our health and society? How do we create buildings people truly love, so that they last?

Seoul was the right stage. With over 1,400 redevelopment and reconstruction projects under way – and half the city’s buildings less than 30 years old – every brief is a high-stakes public-health and climate decision. This is where K-Architecture can step up, making buildings as creative and nourishing as Korea’s wider cultural output, and setting a new agenda where emotion – joy, meaning and connection – shapes future cities.

A few reflections as participant and presenter:

Visual complexity & public health – evidence-based design with emotion at its core

Opening the science-led sessions, I shared a new evidence framework from neuroscience to drive future research and practice in humanising our cities. Upali Nanda (HKS Architects) showed why we must design for emotion and how to do it in practice, followed by academics demonstrating how visual stress and emotion can be measured, with implications for how we build. Richard Upton then showed how to translate the value of human-centred design into investment value for developers.

From demolition to devotion – citizens, communities and connection as key to sustainable development

Thomas Heatherwick’s “1,000-year thinking” reframed longevity as a design goal. A standout sequence paired Stories from Seoul (creative community projects) with How to Be a Good Ancestor: seven buildings people love and cherish. Ronald Rael’s account of indigenous mud construction – and its high-tech reinvention – was especially moving. Sound Skin: a duet between buildings and passers-by and Dancing Facades were powerful, sensory reminders that we experience façades through our entire bodies, not just vision. Human beings deserve human buildings. If sustainability is to be real, not rhetorical, we must design for love and longevity – so adaptation replaces demolition.

What should travel from Seoul to the world?

• Feeling is data. Physiology, behaviour and lived experience belong in every brief.
• Build the toolkit. We have the evidence – now forge collaborations and practical tools to measure emotional effects in real projects.
• Artists as catalysts. Poets, dancers and creative communities reach and empower citizens.
• Change bottom-up and top-down. Invite communities in early – and ensure leaders commission for interestingness and ideas, not just cost and efficiency.
• Aim for love and longevity. Loved buildings are kept, adapted and decarbonised over time.

Seoul set the bar for a creative, public conversation. Let’s keep adding voices globally – across city halls, studios, universities and neighbourhoods – so more places are built in ways people love, and that last.