Gwanggyo City Centre

Since the beginning of the millennium, local nodes with a high density concentration of mixed programs have been used in Korean city planning. These nodes consist of a mix of public, retail, culture, housing, offices and leisure generating life in the new metropolitan areas and encouraging further developments around them: the Power Centre strategy. These centers would normally sever any connection with nature.

The site is surrounded by a beautiful lake and forested hills, and the design responds by placing a carpet of green atop the new program to mediate its impact . The shifting of floors to create balconies has the added beneft of allowing hollow cores that form large atriums. These serve as great communal spaces; lobbies for the housing and offices, plazas for the shopping centre and halls for the museum and leisure functions. In each tower, a number of voids connect to the atrium providing for light and ventilation and creat semi-public spaces. On the lower floors, the atriums are connected through a series of public spaces on various levels linking the towers and serving outdoor facilities of the culture, retail and leisure program.

The diverse program has different needs for phasing, positioning and size. To facilitate these complex requirements, each building is designed as a series of rings. By pushing these rings outwards, every part of the program receives a terrace for outdoor life. Planting around the terraces with a floor to floor circulation system store water and irrigate the plants. The roofs of these hills and terraces are planted with box hedges creating a cohesive, vertical park. The greenery will improve the climate and ventilation, reduce energy and water usage. As a result, the city itself becomes a kind of landscape.