Sewoon District 4
Celebrating Urbanity
This invited competition required solutions on both urban and architectural scales. Entrants were required to provide an urban design for four important blocks of downtown Seoul as well as develop the architectural language for a specific block. The main goal in the design was to produce the beginning of a new city neighborhood that is specifically of its place, of today, and is positively urban; a project that celebrates a dense urbanity, rich and diverse adjacencies, unexpected vistas, and large and small public spaces of all kinds. Machado and Silvetti Associates, in association with their local partner, Space Group, won second prize and as such have been commissioned to design a portion of the architecture for the first block.
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Client: The City of Seoul, Korea
Location: Seoul, Korea
Year: 2004
Status: Unbuilt
Building Typologies
The proposal included three major building types to produce city fabric and establish major spaces: a twenty four storey double loaded office/retail/residential tower; an eighteen storey single loaded apartment block; and an eight storey mat residential building with two floors of retail on the bottom two floors.
Cultural Continuity
In addition, the four corners of the site are marked with exceptional buildings of high recognition value, which result from a combination of the typologies mentioned above. These building components are deployed on the site with the intention of producing a fabric reminiscent of the existing neighborhood conditions. This is achieved in its angular pedestrian paths, in its visual tightness and in the continuity of the commercial ground plane. Thus, cultural continuity is guarantied by the new city, while also producing something new, namely two major public pedestrian spaces, a plaza and a park.