Galleria Centercity has sprung up near the new S-Bahn terminal linking Cheonan to Seoul, just 80 km away. In Southeast Asia (and not only there), such large shopping centers always play an important social role, so UNStudio architects designed not only a department store, but also an impressive public space for cultural exchange: “If today we regard a museum as a supermarket, then we can also view the department store as a museum,”the authors say.
The facades of the building are two-layer wavy media screens: their top layer is composed of vertical glass panels, which are silk-screened with a print that creates the illusion of a three-dimensional image. The panels are separated by vertical metal lamellas that protect the walls from the heat of the sun. The animation and light effects broadcast on the facade, together with the vertical grid of lamellas, completely change the sense of the building's scale: from the outside it is absolutely impossible to understand how many floors there are.
The play with scales and dimensions is continued in the interior - and no less radically. The main theme here was the dynamic flow: organized in several "layers", the interior "unfolds" and changes as the visitors move. The internal structure of the building is based on four rounded "plateaus", suspended and, as it were, untwisted relative to the central "rod" of the giant atrium. Each plateau includes three tiers. Thanks to the movement of human flows clearly defined by this rotation, it is easy to navigate in the space of the shopping center: the central link covers all the main routes of visitors within and between levels.
During the day, the facades of the building are perceived as a monochrome mirror surface. But at night, the media screen completely changes the look of Galleria Centercity. By the way, as conceived by the authors, the screens will not be used to broadcast advertisements for individual brands, as on billboards: animated plots will be more diverse and related to the urban environment.
N. K.
