Emotionally Yours, Seoul

What emotions does your city evoke? A city is never just a collection of buildings.
Its streets and facades carry layers of memory, desire, and sometimes unease.

A glass tower shimmering in the light can evoke either awe or a sense of distance. A small doorway in an old alley might evoke warmth and belonging.

The city is both a physical structure and a landscape of emotions.

Opening on September 26, 2025, The fifth Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2025 will present the Global Studios exhibition, Emotionally Yours, Seoul, an exploration of these emotional dimensions.

This project gathers the emotions that citizens around the world feel when looking at urban architecture, and, through artificial intelligence, transforms them into a vast collective media artwork.

A festival where citizens take the stage
Since its first edition in 2017, the Seoul Biennale has shared diverse global discourses on cities and architecture.

In 2025, the Biennale takes a further step. Moving beyond an expert-centered platform, it becomes a stage where citizens themselves speak, reflect, and imagine the future of the city together.

The year’s theme, “Radically More Human” captures this shift. At its heart, the Global Studios is an unfinished work and an open laboratory, where a single photo and a single emotion, gathered from citizens worldwide, converge into a new collective portrait of the city.

 Emotionally Yours, Seoul
Participation is simple. “Have you ever felt an emotion while looking at a building in your city?”

Upload one photo and a short description of the feeling it evokes. AI will analyze the submission and visualize it in real time on the large Interactive Media Wall installed at The fifth Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2025.

Words and images orbit, forming clusters of connected emotions, responding to the movements of visitors, and revealing the city as a living emotional landscape.

Every contribution is also preserved in the Prologue Gallery Wall and in the online archive, ensuring it can be shared anytime, anywhere. Small individual entries accumulate into a global map of urban emotions.

Participate now through the link here. 

Why emotions? Cities are often defined by density, speed, or infrastructure. Yet the way we experience them is emotional.

The calm of a shaded alley, the fatigue of crowded traffic, the awe of light across architecture, these feelings cannot be reduced to numbers, but they shape our lives in the city.

Emotionally Yours, Seoul turns these emotions into both data and art. Do we feel similar emotions when encountering the same materials—glass, steel, brick—across different cultures? What can a global archive of emotions reveal about the collective psyche of our cities?

Here, AI is not a tool of control, but a medium of empathy and connection.

An invitation to citizens everywhere
Participation is open to everyone. Whether it is a small architectural detail or a fleeting impression, a single photo and one line of emotion are enough.

All contributions will appear on the Interactive Media Wall in Seoul and be preserved in the online archive, becoming part of a collective work that lives and grows with each participant.

The Fifth Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2025 asks citizens across the world:
Join us in Emotionally Yours, Seoul. Share your city, share your emotion, and imagine with us a city that belongs to all.