Gallery

The GIZI _Art Base is a single building tasked to house four different programs – a commercial space, a gallery, an office and a multi-family housing unit, each of which required a unique spatial definition appropriate to its needs and functions. While the ground floor commercial space demanded easy visual recognition and street access, the gallery, which on the other hand called for a more intimate and private setting for viewing and selling artwork, necessitated a more peripheral placement. The office space needed a calm atmosphere, and the individual residential units were asked to be both separately divided yet connected through a central courtyard. In order to accommodate the disparate and conflicting nature of these programs, each of the four was stacked vertically and unified into a singular mass.

Seongsu-dong, a neighborhood of new vitality that has brought new small shops to the existing urban fabric, is creating a self-sustaining cultural system. When I began the project, I had one question: ‘How does JUNG BLDG. adapt to such an environment?’ The client of the building, who runs a gallery and a boutique, often paints portraits of her ballerina daughter on canvas. She wanted architecture to be a container for family life, just as a painting captures the dynamism of human figures. Another requirement was that red brick would not be used in the new building. The client asked that the JUNG BLDG. would be distinct from the surrounding buildings, and that when one walks along from the main street to the alley the pathway would be connected to the site. The area, including the site of JUNG BLDG., north of the Seoul Forest, is now known as ‘Red Brick Village’ that partially supports construction costs. Nevertheless, the client preferred the use of concrete as opposed to red brick.

The challenge of this project was to solve the layout that should be arranged in a terrain of 12 meters long by 5.9 meters wide, without appearing too narrow. Knowing this, the solutions found were; to implant a 3 meters ceiling height, to create communication with the street, to elaborate a background in the store that was more inviting and to sector the floors.

In 2011, the construction works of the extension to the Modern Gallery, a ensemble of pavilions by the architect Hanns Schönecker from the 1960s, had come to a halt. Tow years later, a call for new concepts was held, and the project was awarded to Kuehn Malvezzi. Working with artist Michael Riedel, the architects presented an approach to reconceiving the Modern Gallery that didn’t try to negate the building’s challenging political prehistory, but instead took it as a point of departure for the design. This reconception focused on the museum’s relationship to public space, in terms of both the museum’s physical surroundings (its relation to open spaces in the city and the Saar River nearby), as well as in terms of the political public—its relation to clients and users of the facility.