The study, design, and sale of housing in Korea has been systemically organized by the major development corporations, each of which feature their products through what is called a “Model Home Gallery”. This building type contains sales offices with a myriad of apartment prototypes. Each corporation reserves the base of these buildings for a wide array of amenities for community functions–art galleries, cafés, auditoria, conferences rooms, among other uses that help establish a neighbourly presence.

A competitive housing market has produced an approach to these buildings that is “spectacular”: highly embroidered icons and surfaces that masque what are otherwise typologically simple diagrams. The design of the gallery, completed in 2012, is a figurative volume perched atop a dynamic glass plinth. The transparent plinth exposes the heterogeneous activities within, while creating an enclosed public space with connections to the street, the park, and the urban environment around it. The reading of this public space gains expression through an undulating ceiling that demarcates various infrastructural logics of the amenities overhead. The image of the building from the outside evokes an echo of the unique skyline of Seoul, a syncopated composition of staggered apartment buildings and mountains. Thus, the amorphous massing of the volume above stands apart from the generic volumes of the context, while the folded glass base establishes another language to speak to the sinuous mountain-scape beyond.

Sustainable features include deep vertical fins that with the use of low-reflection, low-e coated glass will reduce the life-cycle cost of the building. To offset high water consumption the Model Home Gallery recycles gray water, using it for the adjacent landscape. Also, the building was sited near public transportation.

This project was completed in collaboration with local architectsaandd and foreign design and CA consultant Ji Young Park (INHA University).