Year: 2017
Type: Urban Design, Competition (3rd Prize, Namtaeryeong Urban Research Competition)
Location: Seoul, Korea
Team: Jae K. Kim, Kyungtaeck Lee, Yoona Hong, Dongwon Lee
Smart Link: New Transportation Hub and Public Park Systems on the Recreated Topography
The Link
The project proposes a new transit and park system with the concept of topographic architecture and landscape recreated from the existing geography. The site is located in the border between Seoul and Gwacheon-si, one of Seoul’s commuters’ cities. The road through the site, Gwacheon-daero, is the only one connecting the two big cities within a 2km radius. Historically, this place has been an important node for transportation. Also, in Korea’s era of development in the 20th Centuries, the site was utilized for granite excavation, which currently is declining. In this context of transportation and a declining mining industry, the main issues of the site are the heavy traffic and how to rehabilitate the abandoned quarry sites.
Urban Design Strategy
The complex situation of the site has degenerated after the completion of Gangnam Beltway in the year 2010. This complexity resulted from two roads --the beltway and an existing road--, quarry sites, businesses, and commercial buildings which recently emerges in neighboring areas, and constraints to establish urban design guidelines in terms of form, circulation, and zoning. For this reason, to overcome these limitations, the topographic strategy of architecture and landscape became a main design strategy in order to generate the urban design rules.
Smart Hub
The idea to resolve current heavy traffic is to create a new transit hub and transportation system. Taking into account the existing plan of the Seoul metropolitan government wishing to provide publicly shared electric cars and transit nodes, the project proposes a technologically advanced new transit hub, the Smart Hub. The Hub is the place in which commuters can transfer their conventional gasoline vehicles, bikes, and public transportation to vehicles without emissions such as electric cars for their final destinations. In virtue of the new system, it is anticipated to reduce the commuting time from Gwacheon to the central business district of Seoul by half an hour.
Renewable Energy Park
The project is self-sufficient. Renewable energy plants generate all the energy needed for the project such as vehicle charging vehicles and facility maintenance. Photovoltaic panels in old quarry’s cliff to the South and rooftop gardens are the main source of energy. Moreover, wind turbines alongside the public park serve as an additional source of power to enhance the project’s self-sufficiency.