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Seoul is a world metropolis. Because the capital of South Korea, it’s the place new design gracefully meets custom. Steeped in a wealthy historical past that spans over two thousand years, Seoul boasts a tapestry of vernacular structure that displays its cultural heritage. On the identical time, town has undergone a outstanding transformation to embrace modernity whereas honoring its previous. In the present day, Seoul is a metropolis showcasing a mix of up to date and conventional architectural types that draw folks from around the globe.
How have Seoul’s fashionable architectural tasks discovered a spot within the metropolis’s dense city panorama? Taking a survey of Seoul’s buildings, every of the next tasks exhibit revolutionary design and development strategies. Difficult conventional architectural norms, they’re redefining town’s skyline and setting new requirements for city dwelling. Take a journey by Seoul’s architectural wonders, the place the previous meets the longer term.
Dogok Most
By Moon Hoon, Seoul, South Korea
This undertaking displays the shopper’s distinctive character, rooted of their experiences dwelling in a mystical home on a excessive space in Gangbuk. The brand new constructing, positioned in Gangnam, combines a basement studio for the shopper’s son, a photographer, a reception space, and a residence for the mom and son, full with a compact elevator for the aged mom’s comfort.
The design strategy diverges from up to date traits, avoiding giant openings to keep up privateness. As an alternative, small and distinctive home windows had been proposed, making a balanced inside with each vivid and darkish areas. The outside design was impressed by the concept of connecting seemingly unrelated parts, leading to a playful and visually partaking look. This strategy, embracing randomness and likelihood, typically results in extra revolutionary options than deliberate design decisions.
Relaxation Gap within the College of Seoul
By UTAA, Seoul, South Korea
The unique empty car parking zone on the primary ground of the College of Seoul dormitory was reworked right into a vibrant house by a collaboration between architectural college students from the College of Seoul (Lee Sang-myeong, Ha Ki-seong, Baek Jong-ho) and UTAA. Beforehand, this space, enclosed by columns supporting the principle workplace, was used primarily for smoking and bike storage, remaining darkish and inefficient. The undertaking aimed to create a brand new relaxation space, transferring past a mere useful house.
Conceptually, the renovation sought to switch the vacant house with a redesigned “relaxation gap” the place folks may calm down and revel in themselves. The prevailing columns, which had imparted a heavy really feel to the construction, had been lined with picket panels to create a extra inviting and spacious environment. The panel spacing permits for the graceful passage of sunshine, sound and air, enhancing the sense of flexibility and openness within the design.
A306 Parking Constructing
By Seoinn Design Group, Seoul, South Korea
This can be a three-story excessive parking construction annexed to the SRH (Seoul Rehabilitation Hospital), the place people who’ve misplaced their potential to stay independently, resembling strolling or working attributable to accidents or sudden sicknesses, are handled. The design idea attracts traces between the right geometry of a circle and arches. Several types of arches are launched to represent the assorted levels skilled by sufferers on the hospital.
The title A3:06 is derived from the Bible verse “Acts 3:06,” recounting the story of Peter the Apostle therapeutic a beggar on the temple. This title serves as a metaphor for all those that come to this facility in search of therapeutic and go away in a position to stroll out as soon as extra. The design of the parking construction not solely gives a useful house but additionally serves as a symbolic illustration of hope and therapeutic for the sufferers of the SRH.
Seoul Memorial Park
By HAEAHN Structure, Seoul, South Korea
Seoul Memorial Park is a contemporary eco-friendly crematorium and park seamlessly built-in into its pure environment. The design incorporates 5 key ideas to boost the expertise and symbolism of the house. First, “Flower Ascension” honors custom by that includes a distinguished flower show. Second, “Street Ascension” harmonizes with Chenggyesan mountain, creating eco-friendly areas alongside a meditation and remembrance path.
Third, “Gentle Ascension” maximizes pure gentle and air flow, making a vivid and nice inside centered round an open courtyard. Fourth, “Kite Ascension” gives a solemn house for remembrance, evoking the sentiment of a standard funeral procession. Lastly, “Spirit Ascension” focuses on environmental sustainability, that includes a double casing cremator system to attenuate air pollution and vitality consumption. Seoul Memorial Park units a brand new customary for eco-friendly memorial areas within the twenty first century.
Roof Sentiment
By SoA(Society of Structure), Seoul, South Korea
The entrance yard of MMCA Seoul faces the Gyeongbokgung Palace, a robust site-specific context. This house, as soon as a part of the Jongchinbu (Workplace of the Royal Family tree within the Lee dynasty), is now an open public space of MMCA Seoul and serves as a platform for Y.A.P in the summertime. Conventional structure in Gyeongbokgung Palace is characterised by its distinguished roofs. Han-ok (conventional Korean style-house) roofs had been giant and heavy to help the picket pillars, making a excessive and deep house beneath.
The traces of those roofs framed the surroundings with the mountains within the background, symbolizing a connection to the heavens and expressing political, sacral and societal meanings. The ‘roof sentiment’ undertaking goals to rekindle folks’s emotions and senses by making a wrinkle roof utilizing reed blinds. This roof sways within the breeze, providing glimpses of the surroundings by its gaps. Not like conventional roofs that cowl the below house, the wrinkle roof uncovers folks’s sentiments, serving as an agent to awaken folks to the summers and the realm’s distinctive environment.
Shinsegae Worldwide
By Olson Kundig, Seoul, South Korea
Within the coronary heart of Gangnam-gu, Seoul, this 15-story constructing stands as a brand new icon, consolidating over 500 Shinsegae workers beforehand dispersed throughout town. The headquarters consists of workers places of work, design studios, a rooftop backyard, ground-level retail, and eating places dealing with a public plaza. The design idea revolves round three themes: style, expertise, and the surprising. The moveable facade and crafted aesthetic mirror the style enterprise’s ever-changing nature, inviting private engagement and defying the conformity of mid-rise towers.
Motion and materiality outline the primary 4 flooring, the place seven metal wheels management 35-foot-tall exterior panels, modulating daylight and altering the constructing’s presence with every configuration. The façade, assembly Korea’s rigorous vitality codes, incorporates applied sciences for warmth discount, thermal consolation, and pure daylight, resembling a woven tapestry—a nod to the style trade’s essence.
Seoul Sq. Ice Rink
By CoRe Architects, Seoul, South Korea
Seoul Plaza, positioned in entrance of Metropolis Corridor, transforms right into a winter sports activities hub providing actions like skating and curling from Christmas by February. The skating rink, a key characteristic of the plaza, underwent a redesign final 12 months (2018) following a public architect proposal competitors. Not like earlier designs, this 12 months’s skating rink introduces a “new structural various” that may be shortly put in and recycled.
Initially conceived as a lightweight vinyl home construction, it developed right into a double air-dome system, guaranteeing straightforward reuse or recycling for the next 12 months. This revolutionary strategy goals to create a short lived but sustainable structure, using gentle and clear non-structural supplies unusual in everlasting buildings. The roof, constructed with a double air-membrane construction product of clear and opaque laminated urethane, is supported by roughly 40,000 ropes, making a visually hanging façade that makes use of pure and inside lighting.
Kukje Gallery
By SO – IL, Seoul, South Korea
This gallery goals to boost Korea’s cultural presence globally whereas harmonizing with the historic environment of northern Seoul. The design blends fashionable aesthetics with conventional strategies, that includes a novel chainmail veil façade product of 510,000 metallic rings. To combine seamlessly into the historic city material, the gallery’s circulation is pushed to the sides, and your entire construction is wrapped within the hand-fabricated veil.
The gallery’s design is delicate to its context, with supplies and patterns impressed by cobblestone streets and regional constructing types. Situated amidst conventional hannok properties, the gallery serves as a landmark in a cultural campus and aids in public wayfinding. The constructing’s type, reflecting the encompassing rooflines, creates a way of lightness and blends with the setting. Regardless of its compact measurement, the gallery gives a flexible house for artwork exhibitions and occasions, together with a 60-seat auditorium for lectures, movies, and performances. Help areas resembling places of work and storage are positioned underground, guaranteeing flexibility in gallery use.
Nationwide Aviation Museum of Korea
By HAEAHN Structure, Seoul, South Korea
The Nationwide Aviation Museum, positioned in Gimpo Airport, aimed to raise the Korean aviation trade’s standing by a multi-cultural house promoted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport. The museum’s design displays three core concepts: “Air Turbine,” impressed by airplane generators, symbolizes the combination of mechanical aesthetics and science know-how; “Air Present,” an aviation gallery, presents the historical past of Korean aviation in a dynamic, panoramic exhibition house; and “Air Stroll,” a three-dimensional walkway, gives a dynamic expertise amid the architectural construction’s shining lights.
The positioning’s format is round, together with the southern beltway and the principle entrance street, making a central place between the airport and help complicated. A 3-floor void within the everlasting exhibition house permits for built-in indoor-outdoor exhibitions by a clear façade. The museum options two buildings: a round exhibition corridor designed for aviation shows and an oblong administration constructing optimized for varied capabilities.
Songwon Artwork Middle
By Mass Research, Seoul, South Korea
Situated in Buk-Chon, an space much less affected by Korea’s speedy growth, Songwon Artwork Middle sits amidst a standard townscape dominated by Han-Okay structure. Over the previous decade, Buk-Chon has skilled a resurgence of curiosity in its conventional appeal, attracting business and cultural companies in search of to protect its distinctive character whereas including new parts.
Given the positioning’s historic significance and architectural context, the design of the Songwon Artwork Middle confronted quite a few challenges and restrictions. The irregularly formed plot, roughly 297 sq. meters in measurement, sits on the entrance to Buk-Chon, creating a particular presence. The constructing’s massing needed to conform to the plot’s form and the adjoining Home of Yoon-Bo-Solar’s sightlines, limiting the above-ground flooring to two-thirds of the utmost allowable space. Because of this, the constructing options three underground flooring for exhibitions, a semi-underground stage for parking, and two above-ground flooring housing a business restaurant and social capabilities.
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