Project Description Parallel City begins with the imagination of dissolving the line between architecture and mobility. Where architecture is typically understood as a site of dwelling and the automobile as a vehicle for movement, Kia’s PV5 proposes a new urban unit that merges the two—making it possible to inhabit while in motion. Developed in collaboration with Kia’s Future Business Planning Team, the project explores structural and sensory possibilities that emerge in the threshold between ‘stillness’ and ‘movement’. The project presents the PV5 alongside steel structures and video projections that cut across interior and exterior space. Components from the actual production line and industrial remnants are reconfigured into sculptural forms arranged like the basic units of a city. Projections and modular structures convey, both visually and physically, the sensation of a new kind of city where architecture and factory intersect. Here, the PV5 functions not as a vehicle of transport but as a ‘moving architecture’ that traverses the boundaries of function and dwelling, expanding the city into a reassemblable platform. Parallel City does not aim for completion or a single definitive answer. Instead, it finds new possibilities in the overlooked moments of stillness, stoppage, and incompleteness within existing systems. The PV5 emerges as a mobility-based architecture, not a fixed house but a subscribable space of residence, fluidly existing within an urban ecology where technology, humans, production, and life intertwine. In doing so, the project proposes the city as a new rhythm, a living form in motion, and a figure of change itself. About the Creator Architect Jaeho Chong understands architecture as a structure shaped by flows of energy and rhythms of time. In this year’s ZER01NE LAB the collaborates with Kia’s Future Business Planning Team to explore the threshold where the PV5 meets architecture, experimenting with a new language that connects mobility and the built environment through the logic of assembly systems and production sequences. With Parallel City, Chong seeks to shift our perception and experience of space at the point where industrial systems blur into urban structures, and where mobility intersects with habitation.

Curator's Note Architecture allows us to remain in place, while the automobile enables us to move away. Between these technologies of “stillness” and “motion,” Kia’s PV5 emerges as a new unit—one that makes it possible to dwell even in movement. At this threshold, Jaeho Chong explores the imagination that architecture could move, the possibility that vehicles could become spaces of rest, and the unfinished ‘forms’ and ‘spaces’ that lie between the evolution of mobility and platform. In Parallel City the PV5 is not a mere vehicle, but a mobility platform that integrates space, function, movement, and dwelling. It becomes a building block of the city, generating sites and relations, expanding the notion of urbanity beyond fixed structures. Chong notes that we live amid flows of capital and energy, and that construction sites, though seemingly fixed, are in fact always moving. For him, ‘movement’ is an energy arising within the gravitational order of vertical and horizontal structures, through which the city is reimagined as a breathing organism. Developed in collaboration with Kia’s Future Business Planning Team, the project positions the PV5 as a hinge between car and architecture, mobility and dwelling. The PV5 is proposed not as a purely functional PBV (Purpose Built Vehicle), but as a reflective and contemplative space, a platform beyond vehicle (PBV), and even a form of mental refuge. The project presents the PV5 as a ‘moving architecture’, paired with a skeletal steel frame structure. Rectangular screens traverse inside and outside, projecting footage from the PV5 production line. These overlapping perspectives blur the boundary between automobile and architecture, collapsing distinctions between production and habitation, function and form. The twin axes of factory and construction site visualize and embody the micro-movements of city-making—the transformations of matter, flows of energy, and rhythms of human and machine. For the audience, the screen ceases to be a flat medium; it becomes an entry point, like stepping into a conveyor belt, where urban generation is experienced as a modular process. Through the arrangement of moving images, architectural structures, and PV5 components, Parallel City operates as an assemblable interface that materializes the abstract notion of the city in visual and bodily terms. Actual PV5 parts, steel, and industrial remnants are reconfigured as sculptural units, transforming the exhibition space into a micro-city. The PV5 thus becomes more than a functional vehicle: it is a modular plug-in, a structure expandable vertically and horizontally, a mobile architecture synchronized with urban infrastructures. It invites us to imagine space as something that comes to us—not a fixed home, but a mobility-based architecture available on demand. The PV5 inhabits the urban ecosystem as a technological, cultural, and sensory medium. Parallel City does not aim for a fixed form or single function. Instead, it finds meaning in moments of non-functionality: stoppage, error, stillness, or incompleteness within efficiency-driven production systems. The pause of a robot mid-journey, between point A and B, becomes a temporal fragment of the city, a glimpse of another possibility. Breaking away from architecture’s static façades or purely functional perspectives, the project proposes a city not only built on fixed structures, but composed as mobile, reconfigurable units that adapt and mutate according to shifting purposes. Here, the PV5 becomes waiting architecture, a moving city, and a rhythm that suggests new conditions and sensibilities of life. Its movement is not merely mechanical, but the name of an ecology—an ever-emerging energy of change co-created by technology and humanity.