The client of the project, Hanwha Galleria, is the owner of the main South Korean chain of expensive department stores. The store that opened this March in the "new city" of Gwangyo (a suburb of Suwon) is the largest of these, with a total overground and underground area of 150,000 m2. However, the company is chasing not only scale, but also original architecture: its two other department stores, in Seoul and Cheonan, were built by UNStudio.
In Gwangyo, OMA was confronted with a context typical of a newly created city: despite its central location, faceless residential towers surrounded the site for the future department store. Therefore, the architects assumed that their construction would become the natural center of gravity for all of Gwangyo, and reacted to the project accordingly.
Its "natural" appearance immediately attracts attention: "layers of rock" (12,000 multi-colored granite panels) are cut by a "shaft" - a curved gallery of 2500 glass triangles of various sizes and shapes. Through it, sunlight and city views penetrate inside, and this is usually avoided when designing a shopping center: so that nothing distracts the buyer, and even the changing lighting cannot be followed over time.
In addition, the gallery, as conceived by the authors, will be able to become a platform for cultural events that the townspeople can see from outside, get interested and join. In general, this building layout - a block cut through by a corridor covering different spaces in the interior and views of the city - is reminiscent of the OMA masterpiece -
Embassy of the Netherlands in Berlin.
The façade, together with OMA, was handled by French VS-A specialists and Korean engineers Withworks.