Over the years, the economy of South Korean mass housing has developed into a highly desirable pursuit, primarily targeting the country’s quickly growing middle class. These apartments—in their design and marketing—center on the idea of providing a “luxury living,” featuring a variety of attractive domestic amenities and sophisticated technologies distilled from extensive market studies and consumer behaviors. Thus, a model home gallery becomes the nexus for consumerist desires and corporate strategy.
Requested by Samsung, the building was to become a unique icon in a newly developing part of Seoul. In order to foster favorable public relationships and expand their customer base, Model Home Galleries provide a variety of public amenities and services for the adjacent community. Consequently, art galleries, restaurants, cafés, auditoria, and other publically open spaces are often ubiquitous features of these buildings, cultivating a spectacle of potential customers scurrying to attend seminars, classes and sales events.
This design proposes an evocatively black box perched atop of an undulating glass plinth. The transparent plinth displays the spectacle of the model home activities within, while creating an enclosed public space, looking out into the adjacent park. Continuous ground plane in the form of a granite sidewalk ease into the first floor, and the reading of this new public space gains expression through an undulating ceiling that demarcate various programmatic and infrastructural logic of the public amenities.
For a full collection of project images, please refer to NADAAA’s website.
A special thanks to the project team for their dedication, effort and patience in completing this project. Photo credit: John Horner & NADAAA Inc.
