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Architects: S.E.E.D haus
- Area: 843 m²
- Year: 2024
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Photographs:Kyung Roh
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Manufacturers: Sto, Ideal Work, Seves Glassblock
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Lead Architect: Sanghoon Baek
Collective Mirror - Supermarket Creative is the name of the advertising company that commissioned us to design this office project. The four young partners founded their own business and named it so as a reflection of their commitment to accommodating any requests from clients in a multifaceted manner. They also aim to be flexible and accessible in what they do and where clients can find what they seek. They requested that we design their first office building in a way that reflects this approach. The project began with the question of designing an office that is, in essence, a supermarket.
Supermarkets are some of the most familiar spaces in our daily lives, where we can buy various things we need. They are also a projection of the ever-evolving lifestyles of people, which drive them to continue reshaping themselves in response to the changing needs. Hence, they are variable spaces rather than fixed ones. How would we convey this meaning in our architecture? How would we project the context of the city that would house our structure to create diversity? How would we make this space flexible and evolve over time? These were the questions we asked ourselves when we started working on the project.
Collective patterns - From fragmental images to collaged images - A city is an artificial environment created by humans at their own discretion. It continues evolving in response to developments in situations and surroundings, creating landscapes by overlapping collective patterns. Our objective was to create images that are strange yet familiar by combining these fragmental images of the city. Identifying patterns generated by temporal and environmental flows, which are often ignored or left unrecognized, is a way to confer new meanings and define relationships with their surroundings. These new combinations of familiar patterns create familiar yet strange appearances that will prompt people to recognize existing patterns in a new light. This is also how we give this building its meaning as a tool for fostering relationships in the context of the city.
Patterns in the urban context are regular forms and constitute a city unit. We abstracted these forms into purely sculptural elements and showcased them to highlight the various aspects of the place. The existing patterns are recreated through various materials and changes in scale to envisage unfamiliar images, which in turn allow people to recognize things that they had not recognized. The building now finds its raison d’être as collaged images that show the multifacets of the city. We employed various images from our surroundings, including old bricks and materials, uncontrived nature, and the traces of time created by the accumulation of different physical properties, to reinterpret the image of the supermarket, a collection of various things, giving it value as an archive and repository of context.
Conscious & Colored space + Garden - Our objective was to blur the boundary between the exterior and interior spaces by extending various patterns and materials from the outside to the inside of the building. This would further widen the physical boundary of the building, allowing people to experience the building as an expansion of space. Colors were used on each floor to make the space's color tangible for people. Bringing about changes to the monotonous and homogeneous concrete space, colors serve as a tool to evoke various emotions.
The garden spaces on each floor were intended to provide a tactile experience of changes in the building over time and changes in seasons. This addresses the common perception that buildings are fixed and unresponsive to their surroundings. In contrast to the homogenization and uniformity of building spaces in urban settings, materials from nature celebrate colors that change over time, offering a variety of ways to stimulate creativity and elicit different emotions.
The project’s inception prompted thoughts about the urban context, potentially aligning with the client’s ideas and expectations. The supermarket's diversity and flexibility will have a significant impact on public interests by surpassing the intentions and expectations of the client and architect and interacting with those who use and experience the space, its surrounding communities, and society at large.
