Architecture is an incredibly lengthy process. I have seen that once you start losing sight of the fundamentals – or the essence of a project – you can easily be swayed by everyone involved, whether it’s consultants, government officials, or contractors. If I want to see the drawings that I have worked so hard on from schematic design through construction documentation become realised as intended, then protecting those core ideas is essential. Even when budget or schedule constraints force us to negotiate and make compromises, I do not allow those fundamentals to be diluted to the point where the project becomes something entirely different.​​

 

This office building is located on an irregular site in Yeongdeungpo – once the historic centre of Seoul – and at the intersection of two roads and a subway line. The building responds to the geometry of the site, placing private spaces along the front and public spaces at its rear. To maximise openness in the front-facing office spaces, the structure has been resolved with only two columns and post-tensioned beams, creating an uninterrupted interior. The glazed void and the metallic solid form reflective surfaces that continually register changes in the surrounding cityscape and weather. The building’s most distinctive architectural gesture is the quarter-circle concave surface carved into the lower portion of the front elevation. ​

 

Adolescence is a time when everything feels uncertain, which is why it can be an anxious time. At this stage of life, we hoped the role of education would be, before anything else, to provide an environment where young people can journey freely at their own pace, rather than be controlled by (albeit kind) directions or guidance telling them which way to go. With this in mind, we imagined the youth centre not as a place for instruction, but as a place for trying things out; a place for long hours of practice, bold experiments, youthful performances, and endless conversations. We wanted to create spaces, large and small, where one person’s initiative might encourage someone else to join in. We imagined young people expressing themselves without hesitation and gradually growing into themselves, and we intended to create a place that could support that journey.​

 

Over 130 years of the site’s history and five decades of architectural time, the site was the Ministry of Finance of the Korean Empire, later becoming the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office (SPO), and now serves as a civic building. Rather than simply renewing the exterior, the project began by reinterpreting time, memory, and a sense of publicness through the building’s façade. The diagonal geometry, derived from the diamond pattern on the existing façade, preserves traces of the past while establishing a new rhythm. Four patterns of Pocheon granite, the project’s primary material, create brightness and introduce variation. On the eastern stair tower, aluminium sheets provide a material contrast to the granite façade, expressing both the building’s historical legacy and its future.

 

The site occupies a long, narrow parcel in a typical residential neighbourhood that stretches along the rear street of the commercial district along Yanghwaro Street and Donggyoro Street, with its shorter sides facing each street. Unlike the adjacent sites, which consist of two merged parcels, this site remains a deep and slender rectangle—the longest footprint within the block. By incorporating the incentive provisions of the district unit plan to maximise the allowable floor area ratio, the resulting mass naturally assumes elegant proportions: the long dimension is twice the width of the short side, while the building’s height is twice its depth. From the earliest stages of the design, the vision was for a 45m-tall brick mass defined by these slender proportions. Although relatively narrow compared to the taller commercial buildings along the boulevard, it was conceived to stand out when faced with the commanding presence of the towers of San Gimignano.