UI | City Hall

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CITY HALL | URBAN ROOF

View showing public access on the roof

City Hall man lobby

Bird eye view

View from the river in twilight

Site plan

General drawings

Conceptual section showing environmental strategies

The proposal, Urban Roof, comes up with a new modal paradigm of public buildings in terms of both architectural and urban scale. It is to be envisaged through two main concepts: Dynamic urban field and Buoying city hall with massive differentiated louvred roof

Configuring a dynamic urban field in terms of quantity and quality – In terms of quantity, ground space should be maximised for the future flexibility and burgeonability for the new city. As quality, it is to make it dynamic field by means of synchronising and vectorising the correlation of matter-objects and matter-movement. Geo-tectonics is developed by using our own scripted 2nd phase of Voronoi Tessellation, which shows gradual changes from curve to straight. It facilitates the design of the riverside landscape. The sizes of tessellated pieces are made parametric to the degree of pedestrian frequencies. On this differentiated field, there distributed and vetorised all site elements such as streetlights, bollard lights, trees, bins, benches and sculptures. The paving materials are easily available from local sites and tessellated pattern enables the landscape wrapped in different heights. It provides various visual experiences from changeable levels. Such a 3D landscape is naturally planned to be guided to the roof of the north mass, which gives fantastic views to Geum River. All these processes materialise the overall organisation of the field and as a result it creates unique and dynamic social, political and cultural environments.

Buoying city hall with a massive differentiated louvred roof – providing large continuous louvred interiors like ‘music with articulated notes’ – that is partly accessible and partly integrated with photovoltaic modules. The louvre is simply made of cold rolled steel plate, which is prefabricated, insulated and integrated/open-cladded with solar panel. By using the economic standardisation, the large amount of roof is confidently procurable with the current manufacturing capabilities in Korea. By buoying the most of the volume of the city hall, the ground space is accessible all around and it leads to the vertical circulations of users to access their own department in an efficient way. This new modes of users’ behaviours generate non-hierarchical/non-linear circulations and give each department its local character and identity without sacrificing the global integrity. Spatially, the continuous louvres and their gradual changes of angles give dramatic daylight experience all the way through interiors and exteriors to users and citizens. The changes of louvre angles are parametrically engineered according to the functions of city hall.

For the New Multifunctional Administrative City, Urban Roof will be the dramatic landmark of openness and give diverse colours of urban activities for the new city.

Status: Honourable Mention, International Open Competition | Location: Sejong, South Korea | Year: 2008 | Architect: Matter Organisation | Client: City Authority | Engineer: Dongyang Structure | Co-architects: Idea Image Institute of Architects, YCH Architects, Archi.S | Parametric Engineering Service: +plastic | Value: 30m GBP |