Rafael Luna
Rafael Luna is the co-founder of the architecture firm PRAUD, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, and the director of the Infra-Architecture Lab. He received a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2010), and his Ph.D. in Architecture focused on Infra-architectural typologies as urban models from L'Accademia di architettura dell’Università della Svizzera italiana, Mendrisio, Switzerland (2022). Luna is the award winner of the Architectural League Prize 2013, and his work has been exhibited at the MoMA, Venice Biennale, and Seoul Biennale. Luna was a co-curator of the Cities Exhibition for the 2019 Seoul Biennale, awarded by the Mayor of Seoul. He has professional experience from the offices of Toyo Ito and Associates, KPF, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Martha Schwartz Partners, dECOI, Sasaki Associates, and Machado and Silvetti. He served as an assistant professor at Hanyang University from 2018-2022, previously teaching for six years at the Rhode Island School of Design. His writings have been published in journals such as G+L, Topos, MONU, SPACE, IntAR Journal, and was a guest editor for the AD magazine’s September 2021 issue "Production Urbanism: The Meta-Industrial City." He is the co-author of "I Want to Be Metropolitan," "The North Korean Atlas" (received the DAM award), and "A Language of Contemporary Architecture: An Index of Topology and Typology."
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Papers by Rafael Luna
As Seoul transitions into the 4th industrial revolution and an aging society, the slab-housing typology will not meet the needs for future generations. Interconnectedness is needed in order to facilitate productivity and social innovation as the majority of the workforce will retire. New typologies of housing hybrids will be needed to provide services, amenities and social interaction between the different demographic groups. This essay looks at a pedagogical experiment for a housing studio to achieve such outcomes.
Infrastructural Duality focuses on the temporal uses of infrastructural spaces as hybrid programmable environments. For a 15-minute city, the aim of this essay it to discuss the optimization of urban frameworks with services and amenities in order to produce a vibrant city.
Constantinos Doxiadis in the 1960’s has become more of a reality than a
futuristic hypothesis. The planetary urbanization involving infrastructures that cross geopolitical boundaries have eroded the concept of a distinguishable city, leaving the problem of how to manage future urbanities. As one of these quintessential expansive megalopolises, Seoul has been able to rise from a war-torn state during the middle of the 1900s to an economic and technological power by the turn of the century becoming a test bed for managing equitable space for its 20 million citizens through the "Sharing City" agenda.
Teaching Documents by Rafael Luna
Books by Rafael Luna
formal architectural composition and not an endless urban sprawl.
In a broader sense, the book discusses the dichotomy between city and urbanization: “city” being an architectural problem of bounded forms, while “urbanism” is an infrastructural project of expansion. It is an uncontested reality that urbanization is a continuous global process that has produced nebulous conurbations labelled as megacities. These expand beyond the virtual administrative boundary of any said “city,” producing a discrepancy between an area of administrative control and the real physical condition of human settlement. If there were a better formal understanding of megacities through their typological architectural conditions, then there could be a better assessment of the qualitative state of urbanization. Avant-garde groups from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s such as Team X, the Situationist, the Structuralist, and the Metabolist worked with ideas of megaforms and megastructures to address this issue. Although most of these proposals remained as paper architecture, this book reevaluates some of these ideas for the 21st-century megacity, using Seoul as a case study due to its clear typological
formations produced over its different periods of governance. The aim is to present the concept for an infra-architectural hybrid model of typological islands and subterranean megastructure that organizes Seoul as a flexible multi-linear city. This book will be of interest to academics and students of architecture, urban geography and Asian studies.
As Seoul transitions into the 4th industrial revolution and an aging society, the slab-housing typology will not meet the needs for future generations. Interconnectedness is needed in order to facilitate productivity and social innovation as the majority of the workforce will retire. New typologies of housing hybrids will be needed to provide services, amenities and social interaction between the different demographic groups. This essay looks at a pedagogical experiment for a housing studio to achieve such outcomes.
Infrastructural Duality focuses on the temporal uses of infrastructural spaces as hybrid programmable environments. For a 15-minute city, the aim of this essay it to discuss the optimization of urban frameworks with services and amenities in order to produce a vibrant city.
Constantinos Doxiadis in the 1960’s has become more of a reality than a
futuristic hypothesis. The planetary urbanization involving infrastructures that cross geopolitical boundaries have eroded the concept of a distinguishable city, leaving the problem of how to manage future urbanities. As one of these quintessential expansive megalopolises, Seoul has been able to rise from a war-torn state during the middle of the 1900s to an economic and technological power by the turn of the century becoming a test bed for managing equitable space for its 20 million citizens through the "Sharing City" agenda.
formal architectural composition and not an endless urban sprawl.
In a broader sense, the book discusses the dichotomy between city and urbanization: “city” being an architectural problem of bounded forms, while “urbanism” is an infrastructural project of expansion. It is an uncontested reality that urbanization is a continuous global process that has produced nebulous conurbations labelled as megacities. These expand beyond the virtual administrative boundary of any said “city,” producing a discrepancy between an area of administrative control and the real physical condition of human settlement. If there were a better formal understanding of megacities through their typological architectural conditions, then there could be a better assessment of the qualitative state of urbanization. Avant-garde groups from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s such as Team X, the Situationist, the Structuralist, and the Metabolist worked with ideas of megaforms and megastructures to address this issue. Although most of these proposals remained as paper architecture, this book reevaluates some of these ideas for the 21st-century megacity, using Seoul as a case study due to its clear typological
formations produced over its different periods of governance. The aim is to present the concept for an infra-architectural hybrid model of typological islands and subterranean megastructure that organizes Seoul as a flexible multi-linear city. This book will be of interest to academics and students of architecture, urban geography and Asian studies.