PROJECTS/COMPETITIONS 2009-2010

SEOUL GRAND PARK INTERNATIONAL IDEA COMPETITION

Symbio Web is an open network park, a new version of the Seoul Grand Park. Multiple entranceways and activities are offered here, with every facility and activity seamlessly tied into different promenades all over the park and in contact with nature. Any activity can be connected to one another, as each individual is able to choose a set of activities according to their taste and with a new sense of freedom to choose any sequence of activity. A new multiple checkpoint ticket system allows visitors to choose their activity with ease, or simply do some shopping and let themselves be tempted along the way.

Somehow, Seoul is a situationist city, a place where the physical environment is constantly changing and facilities are piling up upon each other as the ground level has lost its meaning. With such an urban situation in mind, the painter Constant Niewenhuis’ New Babylon was used as a model to re-engineer the spatial relations in Seoul Grand Park as a network of facilities above ground level.

Gwacheon Valley

THE ISLANDS: RECLAIMING THE GROUND By maintaining a density of architectural objects above ground, we plan to recover the natural condition of the ground. A myriad islands of various sizes would be built with different landscape themes and program-specific surface materials, from sand, stone and concrete to grass fields and water. The space in between would be a partially maintained forest, with streams, pathways, and picnic areas.

Landscape of urban islands

OPEN ZOO: TERRITORIAL EXTENSION
The Symbio Web zoo extends to various sites in the park and interacts with other programs like the science museum, the aquarium, and the promenades. Each island has a specific landscape, which would help form a diverse collection of environments, each of which has its own animals.

Seoul Grand Park International Idea Competition, Seoul, Korea, 2009

Open Zoo

URBAN
SYNTHETIC
HABITAT

The city is a complex spatial system that allows us to look for activities, sceneries, social interaction. As we go trough them we regognise its places, their shapes, their uses, it’s a mental landscape.

In a design team producing an Urban Plan for Sinchon, the Urban Synthetic Habitat is aiming to provide disctintive qualities to a place, an alternative to the soul-less mass produced housing that is currently absorbing Seoul.

USH is a high density housing that is reinforcing the city fabric instead of destroying it.

Sinchon street view

It’s a large scale housing bloc designed for a specific place; its shape and orientation, relation to its environment make it an adapted to the city context It’s a recognizable object in the city. UHS’s mass, shape and design give it an identity, like a mountain in the landscape. It has several faces; it is a complex body that one can understand gradually.

The spaces that compose UHS are sequenced from public to private; courtyards, public square, community gardens, private gardens, private terraces.

Functional diagram

It includes a multitude of uses and housing typologies, some appartments are duplex with gardens, medium urban appartements and large ones with cascading roof teraces up to a few panoramic lofts, officetel and student housing, offices on the north oriented sides. Its diversity responds to the cultural vibration the neighborhood.

So UHS cannot be a prototype that should be reproduced, but the illustration of how large scale housing can be proposed for a Seoul, a viable method to resist the abolition of space that is currently eating the city.

Courtyard

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMOPARY ART- SEOUL

The aim of Contemporary Art Museum is to display the artist work, in doing so, absorbing the city space, playing with the environment.

Art is offered to the city trough a large showcase exhibition room but later, secret treasures may be discovered, exploring exhibition circuits concealed in between the high hall vaults.

On the boulevard

It is a large structure, easy to cross trough two main entrances, a great central hall, and a large garden that relates organically to the urban flows and low rise houses context. The museum spaces are completely opened to the street or completely closed, protected by a mirror polished stainless skin that offers unexpected reflections of the city landscape.

Large halls on the ground level are composed by several shell vaults that reach 14 meter high. These spaces allows for large installations displayed in an urban promenade.

Entrance

This reverse mountain landscape allows a a visit trough various spaces, with different scales and light. Full height large span halls, intimated fine art galleries, high-tech black spaces, terraces to the city and south garden.

The existing Kimusa structure gives the alignment and height, setting back for a large public terrasse. The Museum may be accessed from all directions, south garden, main and secondary streets.


Competition for the New
Museum Of Contemporary Art
Seoul, Korea
year : 2010

Main Hall