SPACE December 2023 (No. 673)
On Oct. 26, Dominique Perraultʼs lecture was held at the French Embassy in Korea in connection with the exhibition ‘Lightwalk, Seoul Gangnam Complex Transfer Center’. Lightwalk is the winning design of the 2017 Gangnam Complex Transfer Center International Invited Design Competition, determined by a consortium consisting of Dominique Perrault Architecture and Jeonglim Architecture, and is scheduled for completion in 2028. Perrault once again encouraged deeper interest in Lightwalk, and this exhibition and lecture had been arranged to fall at the halfway point between winning the contest and completion of the project.
The lecture began by introducing landmark works in his oeuvre, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Ewha Campus Complex (ECC). Both have a sunken-like space at the basement level, allowing natural light into the building during the day and acting like a streetlight on the site at night. Following the example of the Napoli Garibaldi Plaza, this is also a project that functions as a plaza by drawing natural light into its underground infrastructure. A basement, natural light, infrastructure, and plaza are all elements that are connected to the Lightwalk. The project is a metropolitan complex transfer center with a gross floor area of 160,000m2 and a land length of 800m, with six underground floors, a bus transfer stop, public·commercial facilities, and an integrated station where you can ride five metropolitan and regional railways under Yeongdong-daero Street. Perrault installed a 560m-long light beam to allow sunlight to penetrate deep into B4, with the upper part of the building planned to become a large green plaza formed by a rectangular external space surrounded by trees. He explained that, ‘If ECC is a project forming a landscape through its building, then the Lightwalk is a project creating infrastructure through architecture,’ and defined architecture as ‘a space that goes beyond urban objects and constitutes transportation and urban infrastructure’.
Rendering image of Lightwalk / Image courtesy of Junglim Architecture
