Perpetual Spring

Future School Online – v1.3.5

17th International Architecture Exhibition

The Korean Pavilion

La Biennale di Venezia

Perpetual Spring, the first prototype of the Climate Correcting Machine Project, was designed by Obra Architects and first built in September 2019 in Seoul as a public performance/exhibition space and institutional Trojan Horse to the MMCA—The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Perpetual Spring aimed to help create public awareness about the urgent crisis of global warming while publicly establishing it as not only a technical crisis but also as a political crisis predicated on exclusion and exploitation.

For more about Perpetual Spring and its participant programs please see perpetualspring.org

Perpetual Spring, as an ongoing project, proposes an optimistic approach to tackling the problems of climate change by speculation on the redeployment of what is perhaps one of our most prized possessions: the machine. Perpetual Spring proposes the machine as the artificer of a new attitude towards nature. If the OLD machine has been until now the instrument of exploitation par excellence—Perpetual Spring speculates—a NEW machine could instead become the prime tool in the bringing about of a new relationship with the world, a relationship in which we humans collectively cease to be the exploiter to become what Joseph Beuys presciently intuited: the world’s consciousness.

These speculative machines of the future will not possibly ever be built by architect-dreamers, mad-scientists or tech-billionaire-übermensch acting alone, they can only be built in the context of a new collectively-created cultural dispensation. It is only the birth of a new popular zeitgeist that could bring them about. A possibly approaching time of the new machines, will only come to pass if it is itself constructed with deliberate intent using the building blocks of human lives themselves. It is then of prime importance for us to see our present task as the construction of the future by means of reconceptualizing both the objectives and the means of education itself and the contribution architecture could make to that objective.

As part of Future School Online – v1.3.5 17th International Architecture Exhibition at The Korean Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia, taking place between May 22 and November 21, 2021, an assembled team of artists, curators, thinkers and architects will discuss the prospects of architecture and the city, machines and the future of education in the context of the ongoing crisis that first inspired the urgency for a Perpetual Spring.

Alex Taekwon Lee, Professor of Philosophy, Kyung Hee University, Seoul

Giuseppe Stampone and Maria Crispal, Artists, Rome and Brussels

Jihoi Lee, Senior Curator MMCA, Seoul

Obra Architects, New York, Pablo Castro and Jennifer Lee

Peter Lynch, Architect, Stockholm