ION Cheongdam Commercial Building / Urban Ark Architects
ION Cheongdam Commercial Building / Urban Ark Architects
Text description provided by the architects. In the block behind the glamorous Cheongdam luxury fashion street in Gangnam, Seoul, there are still four to five-storey old residential buildings built in the early 90s along with trendy restaurants, cafes, and entertainment agencies that fill the alleys. Cheongdam area is read as fragmentary eye-catching images rather than as the continuity of the physical spaces. ‘urban ark architects (urban ark)’ were commissioned a project to combine two plots, each with old low-storey housing and a beauty parlor.
Considering the context of Cheongdam, where buildings make every effort to attract attention, ‘urban ark’ raised concerns that the project could add another noise to the area if it made excessive gestures on its own. So, on the contrary, the urban ark came up with an idea that a heavy canvas silently stands, and decided to reveal its presence only with the simple mass and its weight. In the north, which had to be cut down by the statutory slant line for the sunlight, the maximum rental area should be secured as much as possible within the limit. But thanks to the setback, various veranda buffers were planned on each floor in consideration of privacy with neighboring apartments at the rear. On the first floor, there is a large open space providing parking lots in front, and a sunken space at the corner open to the basement to increase accessibility from the ground level. The main entrance to the building is slightly turned toward the main crossroad so that people can easily find the access.
Externally, formative play or excessive expressions on the surface were restrained and the simple method of ‘repetition’ was applied. As for the overall volume, the individual floors became a single mass and the masses are floating on top of each other. And the horizontal strip windows are running in-between. Weight can be measured, but the heaviness is a relative concept. The tension created by the masses floating against gravity adds to the sense of heaviness itself. On the other hand, the strip windows provide a panoramic view that expands the indoor space and paradoxically maintains lightness.
Concrete long bricks were used for the exterior wall. Bricks are materials that express a sense of weight. In addition to the visual representation of lumps, you can feel the heaviness of thousands of bricks piled up to form lumps. Fashionable treatment using brick patterns to compose the exterior wall was avoided, and gradation of texture that changes density as it goes up was applied instead. Textures and shadows were handled using only the horizontality of the brick courses and joints elaborately, and the upper floors received the afternoon sunlight thanks to the brickwork with the invisible joints. Here, the upper seamless long brick part also had to be applied to the rear slope of the lump continuously to be read as a whole. It was a challenge to develop details for the rear slope as the concrete bricks with special frogs for the invisible joint are normally used for the vertical brickwork.
Bead-blasted stainless steel and perforated aluminum panels were applied to the exterior wall at the ground level and to the roof parapets respectively to avoid the banality easily seen in brick buildings. Especially the perforated parapets enhance the effect of the gradation.
Now, tenants will reinterpret the space and create their own space story as a ‘place’.
