
Posts tagged with "Seoul":


MVRDV distorts reality in South Korea's Paradise City

2017 Best of Design Awards for Representation – Analog

Seoul's latest skyscraper utilizes 20 different types of glass

The Lotte World Tower rises from bustling Seoul, South Korea, as a sleek new city icon. For the team behind the 123-story building at global architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), creating this seamless silhouette meant a challenge of engineering ingenuity—and quite a bit of glass.
- Facade Manufacturer Shanghai Yaohua Pilkington Glass Group, Daejin (Guardian, Jin Jing, HanGlas), North Glass (glass suppliers)
- Architects Kohn Pedersen Fox
- Facade Installer Lixil Group (facade subcontractor); Lotte (general contractor)
- Facade Consultants Alt Cladding (facade design engineer); Curtainwall Design Consulting (facade construction engineer); Rowan Williams Davies & Irwin (wind engineer); Leslie E. Robertson Associates (structural engineer)
- Location Seoul, South Korea
- Date of Completion 2017
- System curtain wall
- Products DuPont SentryGlas Plus (laminated glass); mirrored frit; heat-strengthened glass; reflective coatings
“Even though it looks like one big monolithic tower, there are 20 different types of glass on that tower,” explained KPF’s Richard Nemeth, managing principal for the project, which opened earlier this year. The 1,821-foot-tall silhouette was inspired by traditional Korean forms like pottery and paintbrushes, but its multiple functions helped dictate the form as well. Office space is located at the bottom, while the tower tapers in two directions—“think football instead of baseball”—offering smaller spans from core to glass toward the top of the tower, where the residences, hotel, and observation deck are located.
At the base, a 100-foot-tall lobby utilizes a gradient of mirrored frits on the glazing to provide shading while accommodating views at ground level; at the top of the tower, frits were used to highlight the diagrid of the belt trusses. The residences utilize laminated safety glass on the inner lite with heat-strengthened glass on the outer lite, while the hotel and office sections use heat-strengthened glass for both. To keep the building from looking like a “giant patchwork quilt,” Nemeth said, the KPF team ensured that the outer lite is always the same thickness, with the reflective coating on the number-two surface. “Then, whatever you do on your inner lite is much less visible to the outside, because it’s inside the reflective coating,” he explained. While the world’s fifth-tallest building includes a number of innovative energy-saving strategies, for many visitors the tower’s crowning achievement is the glass-floored observation deck—the world’s tallest. Cantilevering out, it offers views some 1,600 feet down—with just three layers of 10-millimeter-thick tempered glass with SentryGlas Plus interlayers separating viewers from the ground.
Volcanic stone wraps new publishing headquarters

- Architects DaeWha Kang Design (design architect); Lee & Lee (local architect)
- Facade Installer L’Espace (general contractor)
- Facade Consultants Younha Rhee (sustainability consultant)
- Location Jeju Book City (South Korea)
- Date of Completion 2017
- System reinforced concrete structure with masonry veneer
- Products locally sourced hyeon-mu-am volcanic stone

Pop-up playground design lets you decide what you're playing

DaeWha Kang Design integrates aesthetics and building performance with workplace retrofit
"Every time we build or renovate a building, we make a public act." - DaeWha Kang
By combining contemporary material processes with organic principles, DaeWha Kang Design has transformed a 1980’s-era office building into a new dynamic headquarters for Communique, a public relations firm in Seoul Korea. With a very limited budget, the project team focused on four key points throughout the design process: the production of a human-oriented design, an environmentally responsive facade, a collaborative working environment, and evaluation of design through simulation and measurement. The renovation scope includes retrofitting a ground level parking area into an indoor/outdoor café, re-programming of the office area to maximize daylight for employee desk locations, and a rooftop terrace inspired by traditional Korean hoerang, or circumambulatory walkways. One of the most eyecatching elements of the project is an existing column, on the ground level, clad with a tessellation of silver leaves. The mirror finish stainless steel panels reflect the activity of the street while also visually doubling the height of a relatively low existing space (less than 9 feet). A curved surface between the column and the soffit is realized with singly folded diamond shaped panels, producing a triangulated effect. The pattern expands beyond the intensity of the column, into larger flat shaped panels. This geometry wraps up the facade, producing a primary grid which further warps in response to sightlines of the building from the surrounding urban context. The architects incorporated new high-performance double-glazed units and provided insulation at the exterior walls to combat significant thermal and condensation issues in the existing building. MaCheon grey granite panels regionally sourced provide a strong gray coloration to the facade. DaeWha Kang, Principal of DaeWha Kang Design, says the panels are attached to the facade with a simple bracket and pin anchoring detail allowing for future removal for maintenance if necessary: “That means that even if the building facade needs to be maintained in thirty or forty years time, it will be possible to remove each of the panels from the brackets without damaging them.”- Facade Manufacturer Chowon Partners (Kim Deuk Yong)
- Architects DaeWha Kang Design (design architect); Chowon Partners (local architect)
- Facade Installer Chowon Partners (Kim Deuk Yong)
- Facade Consultants Michal Wojtkiewicz (innovation benchmarking); Younha Rhee (sustainability consultant)
- Location Seoul, Korea
- Date of Completion 2015
- System sealed granite panels on subframe over reinforced concrete structure; stainless steel panels on ground level
- Products fully custom MaCheon grey granite and stainless steel panel assembly, window assembly from custom profiles

Seoul Square to act as a 21st Century platform for self expression

Step Inside MVRDV's psychadelic skyline design for Seoul's High Line

Prefabricated Glamping Tents by ArchiWorkshop
Dynamic steel and PVDF structures shelter campers in style.
In South Korea, glamping—or “glamorous camping”—is all the rage. The practice combines conventional camping’s affinity for the outdoors with hotel amenities, including comfortable bedding and fine food. Seoul firm ArchiWorkshop’s prefabricated, semi-permanent glamping structures are a design-minded twist on the traditional platform tent. “We [set out to] create a glamping [tent] that gives people a chance to experience nature very close, while also providing a uniquely designed architectural experience,” said partner Hee Jun Sim. “There are many glamping sites in Korea, but they’re actually not so high-end. We were able to bring up the level of glamping in Korea.” ArchiWorkshop designed two models of glamping tents. The Stacking Doughnut is, as the name suggests, circular, with a wedge-shaped deck between the bedroom and living room. “We put the donuts at different angles, stacked them . . . and simply connected the lines. This line became the structure,” explained Sim. “The basic idea was very simple, but in the end the shape was very dynamic.” The Modular Flow is a gently oscillating tube, its sleeping and lounging areas separated by an interior partition. The shape was created from a series of identical modules lined up back-to-front to produce the curve. Both models feature a white, double-layer PVDF membrane stretched over a stainless steel frame. The decks are built of wood, while the interior floors are carpeted in a cream-colored textile flooring product from Sweden.- Fabricator Dong-A System
- Designers ArchiWorkshop
- Location Danwol-myeon, Yangpyeong-gun, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
- Date of Completion 2013
- Material PVDF, stainless steel, wood, textile flooring
- Process hand drawing, modeling, AutoCAD, Rhino, 3ds Max, MPanel, laser cutting, welding, bolting

Seoul's Hole: UTAA Collaborates with Students on Wooden Rest Space

A Sartorial 'Shop in Shop' for Neil Barrett
![]() |
![]() |
Zaha Hadid Architects designed 16 bespoke polyurethane display units for fashion designer Neil Barrett's shops.
Fashion designer Neil Barrett hired Zaha Hadid Architects to design a cohesive display concept for a new flagship store in Tokyo that could be easily rolled out to his other locations as well, which include four shops in Seoul and one in Hong Kong. The result had to be as sartorial as Barrett’s fashions, so Hadid’s team came up with the idea of cutting the displays for all of the stores from a single block of material. The concept resulted in 16 bespoke display elements, which all fit together like pieces of a puzzle. "We wanted to design a project that always belongs together but offers a choice between different sizes," said project architect Claudia Wulf. "The reason we designed a modular landscape is that we have extremely different area requirements [across all of the shops]." The units, which are carved from a solid unit, range in size from 13 1/2 feet by 13 3/4 feet to 4 feet by 6 feet. Paired, the units create a sinuous artificial landscape that unfolds across multiple display levels. The pieces can be grouped to suit the scale and space of each boutique, and display shoes, bags, or accessories just as easily.- Fabricators Evergrow
- Designers Zaha Hadid Architects
- Location Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong
- Date of Completion 2008
- Material Corian, polyurethane, glass fiber resin, lacquer
- Process CNC mill, Rhino