Sign up for VMSPACE, Korea's best architecture online magazine.

Login Join


Expanding Boundaries and Creating Flow: Gridscape | Hyunjoon Yoo

Hyunjoon Yoo Architects

written by
Hyunjoon Yoo
photographed by
Kyungsub Shin (unless otherwise indicated)
materials provided by
Hyunjoon Yoo Architects
edited by
Bang Yukyung

SPACE Jun 2024 (No. 679) 

 

 

 

What Should an Office Where Lawyers Gather Look Like?

One day, a client visited me to request the design of a rental building for a boutique lawyer¡¯s office on a side road in Seocho-dong, Seoul. Before I started designing, I examined the operation methods in a lawyer¡¯s office. Modern lawyers¡¯ offices house a collection of individual lawyers who form allied forces. Each lawyer needs a separate room. However, they share secretaries and office managers with other lawyers to keep costs down. Therefore, each floor of the building has many private rooms for lawyers and relatively few support personnel. First of all, we thought that all the members should have access to nature. In short, fresh air and sunlight should be provided through the windows. To accomplish this, we needed to maximise the surface open to the outside air, and we designed a C-shaped plan. 

 

 

 

 

The inside of the plan is shorter than the outside. We placed private rooms for the lawyers, who are majority in number, on the longer side, and each room has a balcony as an outdoor space. We added partitions between the rooms to provide privacy. It¡¯s the approach of a kind of ¡®studio type hotel for lawyers¡¯. The balconies will create colourful building façade with shadows and human scenes on the side road of Seocho-dong.

 

©Roh Kyung

You can see more information on the SPACE No. June (2024).

Architect

Hyunjoon Yoo (Hongik University) + Hyunjoon Yoo A

Design team

Choi Yunjin, Kim Joongaun, Chae Yoomi, Choi Junghy

Location

Seocho-dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul, Korea

Programme

office

Site area

494.97m©÷

Building area

228.62m©÷

Gross floor area

2,336.42m©÷

Building scope

B3, 8F

Parking

22

Height

35.9m

Building to land ratio

46%

Floor area ratio

249%

Structure

RC

Exterior finishing

brick, luxteel, aluminium sheet panel

Interior finishing

exposed concrete, gypsum board, water paint

Structural engineer

TSEC ENGINEERING TOTAL STRUCTURE ENG.&CONST.

Mechanical and electrical engineer

GM EMC

Construction

Janghak Engineering & Construction Co., Ltd.

Design period

Feb. 2021 – Dec. 2021

Construction period

Jan. 2022 – Sep. 2023

Client

Waygood Co., Ltd. et al.

Landscape architect

KnL Landscape Design Studio (Kim Yongteak)


Hyunjoon Yoo
Hyunjoon Yoo is a professor at Hongik University and he leads Hyunjoon Yoo Architects. He studied architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yonsei University, and worked at Richard Meier & Partners Architects. He has won numerous awards both domestically and internationally, including the Chicago Athenaeum Architecture Awards, German Design Award, Young Architect Award, Kim Swoo Geun Architectural Prize Preview Award, and the President¡¯s Prize for Korean Space Culture Awards. He is known as a ¡®humanistic architect¡¯ for his diverse books and broadcasts that provide insight into the world through architecture. His YouTube channel, ¡®Sherlock Hyunjoon¡¯, currently has 1.23 million subscribers.

COMMENTS