Busan is the second largest and most important city in South Korea after Seoul, the largest port in this country. It was founded 135 years ago and today it is undergoing a period of active renewal of its image, including the architectural Busan, famous for several record-breaking buildings at once, in particular, it is here that the longest bridge in South Korea - Gwang'an is located, and the largest department store in the world - Shinsegae Centum City, as well as one of the tallest skyscrapers on the planet - Lotte Super Tower. However, this is not enough for the city. As part of the renovation of the Chung-gu North Port, the Busan administration intends to build a unique opera house on a small artificial island - an international open competition was announced for the project of this building, designed to become a new symbol of the city, in which both professional architects and students of architectural universities could participate …
Levon Airapetov and Valeria Preobrazhenskaya, the heads of TOTEMENT / PAPER, recall that the competition task immediately seemed very interesting to them - primarily because of the very function of the facility (the complex should have included two halls - for opera performances with 2000 seats and a universal one for 1100 -1300 seats), its large area (up to 60,000 square meters) and, of course, its location on an artificial island. “In our work on the project, we proceeded from the fact that such an order for a public building, which is a symbol of the cultural development of the city and its tourist attractiveness, is by no means an exceptional event, and there are many answers to this task,” the architects say. - Therefore, we decided that we needed a new, not boring shaping, and it was on this that we focused our attention, choosing options from the sketches made on this occasion in our bureau. The image of the theater for us had to combine the feeling of improbability (miracle), audacity and be "unfamiliar". It also seemed necessary to us that "oriental" - Korean - be read in the created image. Taking into account that the competition task was formulated in an extremely abstract way, we decided that the building should provide for the possibility of rearranging functions while preserving the image. All together, this determined the method of shaping: the structure consists of simple volumes, arranged taking into account the connections and cut off by a simple form, placed in an incredible position. With any change in the assignment for the set of rooms and their size, the actions are repeated in a similar way: simple geometric shapes are folded and cut off."
The building image is based on a cube. True, TOTEMENT / PAPER would not be themselves if they allowed the cube to simply stand on one of the faces and freeze motionless in this position, so the rib serves as a support in this case. And since, recall, the theater is located in the center of an artificial reservoir, it turns out that one of its corners completely goes under the water, and the surface of the latter, in turn, reflects and emphasizes its inclined edges. Among other things, the cubic shape of the building made all the facades of the theater building equally significant - according to the architects' plan, thanks to this it will be equally dynamically perceived both from the Busan embankment and from the sea.
Before us is a cube, which is as open as possible to its surroundings: numerous folds of different depths, formed during folding of a complex shape, make the shell of the building look like a skillfully peeled peel of some exotic fruit, which seems to be stretched like a spring, then twisted into a tight spiral. The dynamism of the invented structure is emphasized with the help of materials: the outer surfaces of the cube are sheathed with sheets of polished metal, the inner walls of the loggias and boxes are painted bright red.“Thanks to metal, the cube with its lower edges reflects the earth and water, the upper - the sky and the sun, thus, uniting in itself all four elements of the world, - the architects explain their idea. "The red color, in turn, contributes to the emergence of many visual associations (the building looks like a faceted crystal, and an opening flower, and a" pagoda without a foundation ") and retains this image for a long time." Of course, the architects chose red because it is historically associated with the theater, especially the opera house, the halls of which were traditionally decorated with scarlet velvet.
In the part of the cube that goes under the water (and below the water, since the bowl of the reservoir is raised above ground level), there are cafes, ticket offices, souvenir shops and courtyards with pools. Visitors can get to the underground-underwater part of the theater directly from the embankment or by going down the ramps cutting through the reservoir. The theater is connected with the city by two bridges. One of them - transport and pedestrian - leads from the embankment under the reservoir, to the support part of the cube, where all the necessary loading is carried out, and a parking lot for tourist buses is also designed. The second - purely pedestrian - rises from the embankment to the theater lobby at the +13 m mark, and the passage along it turns into a whole spatial performance: with its help, viewers get the opportunity not only to view the pictograms of the reservoir, but also to bypass the theater itself, as well as through numerous niches look inside the building.
An unusual journey can be continued after entering the building: moving from level to level and getting to numerous internal-external platforms, the audience, according to the TOTEMENT / PAPER concept, will be able to observe the internal life of the theater, for this purpose parts of ballet classes are open here and rehearsal rooms, restaurant kitchens and decorators' workshops, stages, offices and even part of the warehouse space. “Thus, we tried to tell about the tremendous efforts of hundreds of people creating a mesmerizing action - the Theater,” - say the authors of the project.
The striking architectural solution of the building, amphitheaters soaring between heaven and earth, and observation decks located at all levels of the building, from which magnificent views of the city and the ocean open up, make the new theater an integral part of the urban panorama, and the panorama, in turn, is a part of the unforgettable show. And this interconnection of external and internal, simple (external cube shape) and complex (internal structure of the building), reflecting (metal) and absorbing (interior decoration) is also very characteristic of TOTEMENT / PAPER - they themselves compare their theater building with an overture to the main action, which awaits the viewer in the very center of the cube - one of the two theater halls.
