An architecture and urban design firm co-founded by Maider Llaguno-Munitxa, Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture, recently won a competition to design the Korean Museum of Urbanism and Architecture (KMUA) in Sejong, South Korea. The firm, AZPML, is focused on the development of environmentally informed building and urban systems – and they won the competition alongside Yukyung Kim of UKST. The competition was organized by the National Agency for Administrative City Construction; the team’s proposal aims to create an ecological and cultural experience centered on urbanization and architecture’s role in the climate crisis. View a short video about the project here.

The team at AZPML and UKST proposes that the Korean Museum of Urbanism and Architecture exemplify the industry’s best construction practices in terms of ecological and environmental performances.

The museum will reuse the steel girders of decommissioned infrastructure to build an oversized scaffolding to hold real fragments of architecture. The project will exemplify urban mining, preserve resources, and reduce embodied energy, carbon emissions, construction waste, and pollution. The competition has been featured in ArchDaily, designboom, as well as on the AZPML website.

Llaguno-Munitxa’s work focuses on the study of environmental phenomena and the exploration of data driven design strategies to define novel design practices that aim to improve urban environmental health and resilience. Her fields of knowledge include architecture and urban design, urban physics, building physics, environmental analysis and visualization, and computational design. Her work has been published in various international architectural periodicals and newsletters as well as in scientific journals focused on the topics of environmental sciences and design computation. Her work was recently awarded with the Columbia University GSAPP 2020 incubator prize, and the 2019 | Land Der Ideen_Beyond Bauhaus Prototyping the Future Award. Prior to joining Northeastern University, Maider was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University and taught at GSAPP Columbia University, at the ETH Zurich Institute of Technology in Architecture where she obtained her PhD, and was co-director of the Bilbao/San Sebastian visiting school program of the Architectural Association in London amongst others.