LIMAS / Farming Architecture

Curated by María Francisca González

Architects: Farming Architecture
Area: 90 m²
Year: 2018
Photographs:Kyungsub Shin
Manufacturers: Rareraw, Roman Ceramics, Well-Being
Lead Architects: Jangwon Choi
Construction: Infull Space

LIMAS / Farming Architecture - Facade — © Kyungsub Shin

Text description provided by the architects. This new space for LIMAS reached completion in 2018. After starting off in 1973 under the name SAMIL as primarily a lighting company, LIMAS is now a design-focused lighting brand. LIMAS's lighting philosophy is best summed up as “harmony between space and ever-changing human emotion and needs.” Embodying this vision called for the overcoming of practical problems such as spatial change and separation from the production line.

LIMAS's flagship store began with a plan for reconstituted space and a new image. It started off with a comprehensive reconfiguration of office space, the design development room, product storage space and the showroom, while also taking into consideration cognitive aspects of the building's façade. Since the existing worn-out exterior of the building was not capable of conveying LIMAS's brand identity, the first-floor façade was redesigned to naturally reveal the interior space.

We proposed two moving walls and a fixed, semi-transparent wall as ways of enabling different functional choices within the small 90m2 floor area. The rectangular floor plan is divided into two layers. It consists of a foremost display space for introducing lighting products to customers, an exhibition space allowing them to touch and experience various products, and an innermost storage space to allow easy management of products. Having these three different spaces close to each other, yet independent from each other, allowed efficient service involving diverse products and customers.

The two low display walls, seen from the outside of the building, can combine various layouts in accordance with the character of each promotion. In the display area of the showroom, shelves and storage spaces for product information images can be used by opening and closing the hinge walls. Various organic combinations of the half-mirror walls allow flexible configuration of the 33m2 space, for functions including exhibitions and meetings. The half-mirrors hold infinite reflections of 'LIMAS' and ' SAMIL', symbolically showing the lighting company's continuous identity from past to present and future, without the use of addition signage. In the exhibition space, steel cubes of varying heights can be configured for use as tables, chairs or display pedestals. The LIMAS flagship store thus presents not a fixed image but a variable and experimental space, capable of continuously adapting to change and embodying new light.