HUB / Hyunjoon Yoo Architects

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Text description provided by the architects. HUB of Seoul is a place for the people who want to start their own business. City of Seoul supplies the space, human network, education and some financial consulting for them. Many young adults gather to this place for their future vision. The facility is free thanks to the municipal financial support.

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Anybody who wants to start their own business can apply for getting some space at this center. Two groups; “Social Business Association” and “Jobs for Young Adults” supply the office space and free consulting for six months until they can launch their own business. The initiating person starts at the open office area with couple of members. Once they get more detailed business plan, the team moves to the individual cell office. Therefore the clients requested the space for the individual beginners, and sound insulated cell offices for matured groups. Besides, they wanted to have restaurant, library, seminar rooms, lecture halls, cafeteria, concert hall, gift shop, head offices etc.

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Create a City

Basically, we need to create a small town in the area of 3,200 sqm. We studied urban structure of Rome and New York. We liked plazas and river of Rome; and central park, grid and diagonal Broadway of New York. First step of design process was to layout the road network on the huge flat space. The network is composed of diagonal ‘Broadway’, plazas, and river. The HUB is a miniature of a city, while the sound insulated cell offices are the houses of this city.

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More Social, More Flexible

The client stressed on the “flexibility of the space”. Because, they could not expect how many people and what kind of people will use this place. They also did not know how those people use this place. So, they wanted maximum flexible space. Our design solution was to create a house with decomposable walls; and decomposable table for multi-functions. The users can slide the walls and reassemble the table components for their needs. As a result, the space is ever-changing scape.

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Colors of the space

We thought that the architect can only guide the sketch of the space, the users will do coloring on the space with their activities. The completion of the space is done by the activities of the users. HUB shows this concept really well. After we finish the construction, we have visited once every month. We could speculate the coloring process of the space. It started from the rearrangement of the tables, and new furniture that tenant brought. All the small decorations on wall vitalize the atmosphere of the space of HUB. HUB will grow as the tenants come and go, it will evolve with the growth of the young people in this place. 

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