Located at about the mid of the narrow alley formed between Hapejeong station and Sangsu station in South Korea, ‘Soseum’, is a residential building featuring an extruded roof that looks like an edged triangle. Designed by Seoul-based architecture studio SML in association with At Coom Partners, the structure faces the sky sitting adjacent to the neighboring buildings. According to the architects, the building is designed as per the right of sunlight. “The construction was quite tricky because the frontal road was narrow and also the site was long and narrow. It required painstaking effort and aspiration of engineers.” The firm shared more about the project with SURFACES REPORTER (SR). Read on:
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Surrounded by low-rise housing units made of red bricks and the dangin-ri power plant, which has been staying at this place since 1930, the triangular structure’s facade looks southeast and the rest of the buildings are around.
It reached out its hand while standing a step backward from a road. Indifferent from a distance, warm and tender at hand. The firm created a flexible and vigorous interactive space by expanding the stairs to the public domain.
The sunlight oblique line of due north direction
All buildings in residential areas are subject to the oblique line for the right of sunlight in the due north direction. The setback regulations of the right of sunlight stipulate the allowable outermost boundary as well as the maximum volume of the building. All sites, where the construction is available, are different in shapes, orientations, and areas, and thus those all entail the virtual volumes with different shapes that should not be invaded.
The firm wanted Soseum to be a characteristic volume by actively accommodating the legal restrictions applied to it. Both the side of setback regulations in due north direction and the elevation of the building stay with a parallel plane. It was designed to maintain the directionality to the point that such an extending slope and a vertical wall meet together, and to extend it further with no interruption to create the rising volume and peaked inner space.
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Elongated Triangular Volume
Soseum is 5,6 metres in width and 17 metre in length with narrow and long and borders 3m-wide lanes.
It takes shape as an elongated structure. The facade is rather narrow, while the rear is relatively wide. It remained vacant for a long time amongst old residential areas.
There are 2-4 storied houses around and lately cafes, design offices have moved in.
Encourage Flexible and Vigorous Interactions
The wall of the Dangin-ri Power Plant is blocking one side of the alley of 3-meter-wide in the site, where Soseum is located, and the residential facilities such as the multiplex houses and multi-dwelling houses are standing in series around the other side of the alley.
Most of the buildings standing around the street mainly showed outer walls with minimum windows planned, and it was difficult to find public spaces for interaction with each other such as parks around them.
“We considered so that Soseum can be created as a space for flexible and vigorous interactions by giving a breathing room through retreating from the frontal road and expanding the stairs to the public domain and opening the elevation.”
Open Elevation
Architects planned the Soseum as an open elevation toward the alley. It contributes to a creation of a bright street environment by designing the elevation facing the street to be a wide window.
They also designed the eave so that the sunlight can be adjusted according to the season by expanding the elevation to reduce the sunlight load in the summer due to the high and wide front windows.
Project Details
Architect : SML(Seungmo Lim), at COOM PARTNERS(Jongseok Kim)
Design team : Kim Jaeil, Joohyeon Lee, Jeong je yun
Location : 81-47, Hapjeong-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul, Korea
Programme : neighbourhood living facilities
Site area : 104.43?
Building area : 54.53?
Gross floor area : 152.43?
Building scope : 52.22%
Building to land ratio : 145.96%
Structure : RC
Exterior finishing : Exposed Mass Concrete, Transparent Pair-glass
Interior finishing : Exposed Mass Concrete, Concrete polishing, Water paint
Construction : at COOM PARTNERS
Design period : 2019. 11. ~ 2020. 3
Construction period : 2020. 7. ~ 2021. 7
Photo Courtesy: Kyungsub Shin
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